Modern Literature and The Death of God

MODERN LITERATURE AND THE DEATH
OF GOD
MODERN LITERATURE
AND THE DEATH OF GOD
by
CHARLES 1. GLICKSBERG
Brooklyn College
of the City University
of New York
THE HAGUE / MAR TINUS NIJHOFF /1966

ISBN 978-94-015-0251-1 ISBN 978-94-015-0770-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-0770-7
Copyright 1966 by Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Nether/ands
All rights reserved, including the right to trans/ate or 10
reproduce Ihis book or parts thereof in any form
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Some of the material in this volume originally appeared as articles: "To

Be or Not to Be: The Literature of Suicide," Queen's Quarterly, Vol.
LXVII, No.3, Autumn 1960; "Graham Greene: Catholicism in
Fiction," Criticism, Vol. I, No.4, Fall 1959; "The Numinous in
Fiction," Arizona Quarterly, Vol. XV, Winter 1959; "Eros and the
Death of God," The Western Humanities Review, Vol. XIII, No.4,
Autumn 1959; "Dostoevski and the Religious Problem," Bucknell
Review, Vol. VIII, May 1959; "Existentialism in Extremis," The Uni-
versity of Kansas City Review, Vol. XXVII, Number 1, October 1960;
"Aesthetics of Nihilism," The University of Kansas City Review, Vol.
XXVII, Number 2, December 1960. I wish to thank the editors of
these publication for granting me permission to reprint this material.
T ABLE OF CONTENTS
PART 1. THE LOSS OF FAITH

I. Modern Literature and the Death of God 3
II. God and the Alienated Self
1. The Loss of Faith 17
2. The Kafka Universe 22
3. Andre Gide and the Gratuitous Act 26
4. Modern Man in Search of his Lost Self 28
5. The Absurd Self 32
6. The Flight from Self in the Wodd of
Samuel Beckett 33
III. Eros and the Death of God 36
PART II. THE SEARCH FOR GOD

IV. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
1. Existentialism in Extremis 57
2. The Aesthetics of Nihilism 64
V. Dostoevski and the Problem of Religion 71
VI. The Literature of Suicide 88
VII. The Numinous in Fiction 100
VIII. Religion and the Novel
1. The Dialectic of Belief and Expression 111
2. The Secular Novelist and the Religion Problem 117
IX. Catholicism in Fiction 122
X. The Dialectics of Tragedy in an Age of Unfaith
1. The Negative Conditions 139
2. The Christian Mythos and the Tragic Resolution 142
PART III. THE SUMMING UP
XI. Conclusion 149
Index 159
PAR T I:
THE LOSS OF FAITH

HAVE YOU HEARD of that madman who lit his
lantern in bright daylight, ran into the market-
place, and cried continuously: "I am looking for
God!" ... Since many happened to be gathered about
who did not believe in God there arose a great
laughter. "Has he gone astray?," one asked. "Has
he lost his way like a child ?," said another. "Or
is He hiding? Is He afraid of us?" "Has He
boarded some boat, perhaps emigrated?" Thus the
cries and laughter went. The madman leaped into
their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "What
has become of God ?," he cried, "I will tell you!
JY/ e have murdered Him, you and I. All of US
are murderers. But how did we do it? How
were we able to drink up the ocean? Who gave
us the sponge to wipe out the horizon? What did
we do when we unchained the earth from its sun?
Whereto is it moving now? Whither are we
moving? Away from every sun? Are we not
continuously falling? And backwards, sidewards,
forward to all sides? Is there still an up and
down? Are we not wandering aimlessly through
an infinite void? Does not an empty space breathe
upon us? Has it not grown colder? Isn't night and
always more night approaching? Must not lanterns
be lighted in the forenoon? Do we as yet hear
nothing of the gravediggers who are burying God?
Do we as yet notice nothing of the divine decay? -
Gods also decay! God is dead! God will remain
dead! And we have killed Him! The most sacred
and the most mighty that the world has hitherto
possessed has bled to death from our knives - who
will wipe his blood from us? With what waters
can we be cleansed? What feasts of atonement,
what sacred games will we have to invent? Is not
the magnitude of this deed too much for us? Will
we not ourselves have to turn into gods merely
to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater
deed - and whoever is born after us because of
this will belong to a higher age than all history
has been thus far!"
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, quoted in

Otto Manthey-Zorn, Dionysus: The Tragedy of
Nietzsche. Amherst: Amherst College Press,
1956, p. 77.
CHAPTER I
MODERN LITERATURE AND THE DEATH

OF GOD
The growing realization in the twentieth century that God is dead was
bound to bring about a transformation in consciousness, sensibility, and
ontological values more revolutionary than that which took place when
Copernicus overthrew the Ptolemaic system or when Newtonian
physics triumphed and the laws of Nature supplanted the laws of God.
In the pre-Copernican view of the universe, man was accorded a central
place; all the spheres revolved around the earth. What made this
planet important was not the central position it occupied but the fact
that it was inhabited by rational creatures whose destiny hung in the
balance, that it was the object of Heavenly solicitude. God might dwell
in solitary and self-sufficient splendor up above, but he was not un-
mindful of man and his affairs. But the astronomical systems of
Copernicus and Kepler pushed back the boundaries of the medieval
universe so that the physical universe was infinite in space, infinite in
the number of solar systems it contained. In the light of these disco-
veries Christian theology would in some of its details have to be
revised and brought up to date. 1 And now the twentieth century us-
hered in an age which acknowledged the death of the God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, the end of the moving myth of the Incarnation and
Redemption.
Without the presence of God, even if only immanent in the heart of
creation, without the horizon of the absolute, the dimension of the
eternal, the writer beholds a world no longer held together and trans-
figured by the sense of the divine. It is changed, alas, into a bare, alien,
desolate universe of sense data and quantum mechanics. By eliminating
the realm of the supernatural, science intensified the perception of the
absurd. For the image of Nature red in tooth and claw that nineteenth-
1 Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1948, pp. 102·108.
4 THE LOSS OF FAITH
century biological science projected was utterly indifferent to the

passion of subjectivity, the inveterate hwnan longing for immortality,
the desire of man to become like God. With the relentless logic of a
Kirillov, Michael Bakunin, the Russian anarchist, argued in God and
the State that if God exists, then man is deprived of freedom. But man
must be free and he has the power to win his freedom; "then, God
does not exist."2 Yet the syllogism, though it serves to make man free,
thrusts upon him a burden of responsibility that is the source of intense
existential anguish. It is this counterpointed theme of Promethean
defiance and Sisyphean torment that we shall attempt to analyze as it
makes itself feit in the literature, chiefly, of the twentieth century.
Man is free to choose, but of what importance is the choice he finally
makes in a world infected with absurdity? Nietzsche had taken pride
in his role as the murderer of God, but his blasphemous rejoicing could
not dispel the terror of the infinite. How would hwnankind bear up
under the inevitable and always imminent threat of death now that it
had been deprived of the promise of salvation? If God is dead and the
old supernatural sanctions are but superstitious myths of the infancy of
the race, then there is no transcendent goal toward which mankind
must move and no answer which the mind can provide for its metaphy-
sical questioning, Henceforth godless man, despite all his soul-searching
and desperate conflicts of conscience, could discover neither meaning
nor purpose in Nature. As Theodore Dreiser confesses:
As I see him, the unutterably infinitesimal individual weaves among the mysteries a
floss-like and wholly meaningless course - if course it be. In short, I catch no meaning
from all I have seen, and pass quite as I came, confused and dismayed. 3
Having caught a glimpse of the night of nothingness which swal·

lows up all human ideals and aspirations, Nietzsche, the forerunner of
modern consciousness, sought to view life and the world as an aesthetic
spectacle that required no further justification. In The Birth of Tragedy,
as we shall see in a subsequent chapter, he exalts the rebel who recog-
nizes only aesthetic values, and his Dionysian cry of abandonment won
him a host of disciples. There was, he saw, no goal for humanity, no
cosmic support for moral aspirations. Men must chart their own course
and create their own gods, so that they may be led to believe in god.
Men are in need of sustaining illusions. Truth is but a means to a
desirable end. With an elan of fanaticism that was "religious" in its
2 Michael Bakunin, God and the State. New York: Mother Earth Publishing Associa-
tion, n. d., p. 25.
3 Theodore Dreiser, "What I Believe," The Forum, LXXXII, (November 1929), p.
320.
MODERN LITERATURE AND THE DEATH OF GOD 5
ultimate concern, even though this took the form of a radical nega-
tivity, he pursued the quest for meaning without the benefit of the
divine. This was the mark of his extraordinary courage as an existential
thinker: he was resolved to find out whether values could be affirmed
without dependence on God. If he celebrated the Greeks and their
capacity for giving birth to tragedy, it was because they possessed the
moral strength to look horror in the face and still say yes to life.
The modern writer, distrusting like Nietzsche the validity of the
truth his intelligence wrests from the mysterious universe, resigns him-
self with a bad grace to a purely aesthetic resolution of the problem of
existence. He begins to doubt, too, the value of his dedication to art.
For he has come to feel that he has lost the tragic sense of life. His
metaphysical passion has become self-conscious, critical, and destructive
as it fights in vain against the fatality of the myth of nothingness. But,
as Kierkegaard declared more than a century ago, "when the age loses
the tragic it gains despair. There lies a sadness and a healing power in
the tragic, which one truly should not despise.... "4
Dostoevski had faced the same problem but after his encounter with
death before a firing squad, the execution that was called off at the
last moment, and his period of exile in "the house of the dead" in
Siberia, he came to the conviction that nihilism represented the greatest
menace to mankind. It had to be combated, and the fiction he produced
is the testament of his struggle against the demonic, the plague of the
meaningless, the curse of dwelling in a universe that is without the
light of God. He was too honest and too profound a novelist not to
reveal "the truth" that supported the Devil's argument; he knew in his
own mind and flesh and conscience the singular force of the temptation
that resides in nihilism. Dostoevski and Kierkegaard as opposed to
Nietzsche - these are the vital figures in whose name the conflict is
fought in the literary consciousness of the modern age. When Dos-
toevski prepared to compose a long novel entitled Atheism, later called
The Brothers Karamazov, he decided - and that was, as we shall point
out in a later section, characteristic of his method and the complexity of
his tragic vision - to wade through a whole library of atheistic works.
In his original conception of the novel, he had planned to present a
character who suddenly loses his belief in God, a theme that would be
thoroughly Russian in treatment. It would portray the disastrous effect
this loss of faith has on the hero, but at the end he would find salvation
4 Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or. Translated by David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin
Swenson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946, I, 118.
6 THE LOSS OF FAITH
in the Russian Savior and the Russian God. The fundamental idea of
the novel, as Dostoevski explained in one of his letters, "is one that
has tormented me, consciously and unconsciously, all my life long; it is
the question of the existence of God."5 That is why he chose a hero
who would be an atheist. According to an apocryphal tradition in the
family, Dostoevski pictured himself in the character of Ivan Karama-
zov.
Dostoevski's resolute struggle, on a conscious level, against the
virulent disease of nihilism, availed him naught in the construction of
this epic novel. Father Zossima is overshadowed by the figure of the
Grand Inquisitor, Ivan is a more dynamic and compelling character
than the saintly Alyosha, just as in The Possessed it is not Shatov, a
tormented religious seeker, who chiefly engages our attention but
Kirillov and Stavrogin. Pitting reason against life, Dostoevski in Notes
from the Underground fiercely espoused the side of life. By refusing to
accept the limitations of the rational, he preserved in his fiction the ten-
sions that are basic to the tragic vision, so that, though he clung to the
Christian faith which is beyond proof, no writer is more obsessed with
the voice of the Tempter, the Devil who contemptuously denies all that
the heart passionately affirms. Dostoevski is scrupulously faithful to the
creative logic of his material and to the seductive power of atheism
even when he portrays his nihilistic heroes as driven to the point of
madness or suicide. One is reminded in this context of an entry Kierke-
gaard made in his Journals in 1837, when he was only twenty-four
years old: "A man wishes to write a novel in which one of the charac-
ters goes mad; while working on it he himself goes mad by degrees,
and finishes it in the first person."6
The evangel of redemption from the tyranny of God that both
Nietzsche and Bakunin sounded so challengingly brought man a free-
dom for which he was unprepared and which proved a curse rather
than a blessing. A Kirillov was "mad" enough to kill himself as a
means of proving that God did not exist, but the intellectuals had no
desire to do away with themselves, though the theme of suicide plays a
prominent part, as we intend to show, in the work of a number of
twentieth-century writers. Freedom in a godless world was at first an
exhilarating and then a truly frightening experience, but suicide was,
after all, a futile, self-defeating gesture since it rendered impossible
5 Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky to his Family and Friends. Translated by
Ethel Colburn Mayne. New York: The Macmillan Company, n. d., p. 190.
6 The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard. Translated by Alexander Dru. London and New
York: Oxford University Press, 1927, p. 16.
the human protest against the absurdity of existence. The modern hero
was free, but for what earthly purpose would he use his freedom? Can
the writer in our time give birth to a tragic literature that is not borne
up by the passionately cherished hope of transcendence? On what
grounds and with what justification can he continue to create in a
universe that is unutterably absurd?
He has lost even the crusading passion that inflamed the nineteenth-
century atheist in his war against what he considered the infamous lies
of religion. No longer can he take up arms against the foe and dash off
epics in the vein of Prometheus Unbound, envisioning a golden age of
freedom to be established in the future in which all the man-made evils
on earth would be abolished. Increasingly, in an age of crematoria and
atomic extermination, he has had to surrender his faith not only in God
but also in man. What was there, after all, to bind him in sacred
solidarity to his kind, what moral obligation, what categorical im-
perative? Did not the Nazis act on the assumption that God was dead
and therefore everything was permitted? Pity was weakness; the race
was to the swift; Caesar reigned instead of Christ. But if the writer
also lacked this vital faith in man and the ultimate meaning of life
which man embodied, how could he fulfill himself creatively? The
source of his spontaneity and productivity dried up. In the name of
what ideal was the literary enterprise to be undertaken? What truth is
he seeking to justify in his modern version of Paradise Lost? It was as
absurd to go on writing as it was to go on living.
Sartrean Existentialism is a philosophy dedicated to the proposition
that man is doomed but not damned. The distinction is important. If
man were damned he would be suffering from a sense of guilt, and
thus there would be ideals to strive for, bliss to attain, just as hell, by
the law of polarity, presupposes the existence of heaven. Sartre puts
ac. end to all such illusions. There is neither heaven nor hell, neither
si:l nor guilt, neither God nor Devil. Man is doomed in a universe that
is indifferent to his needs. Once the gods created him they ceased to
have power over him. The one thing neither God nor Nature can take
away from him is this freedom of choice, and if man exercises that
freedom he need not be tormented any longer by the furies of remorse.
His doom constitutes his tragic grandeur. Alone of all living creatures
he knows his end and can face it with fortitude. Existentialism, like
Dada but on a higher plane, expresses the spiritually orphaned state
of modern man, his incapacity to make any meaningful affirmation.
Existentialism has drawn the necessary conclusion: if God is dead,
8 THE LOSS OF FAITH
then the moral laws that man had hitherto obeyed unquestioningly must
be abandoned. Man shapes his own values and must depend on his own
resources. Heidegger had formulated a metaphysic which showed how
man could escape the coils of inauthentic existence by taking on his
own shoulders the burden of responsibility for his destiny, and that
meant freely acknowledging the terminus of death toward which he is
inexorably driven. Out of this awareness of the contingency of exist-
ence, his final indenture to death, springs the overwhelming feeling of
"dread." Caught in the trap of time, man reaches out eagerly to the
future, fleeing from nothingness and yet rushing headlong toward the
death that is nothingness. Heidegger's philosophy, oriented toward
atheism, is congenial to those people who find it impossible to believe
in God. Man must face his loneliness in the universe and the prospect
of annihilation, without the narcotic comforts of religion.
This is the condition of alienation and revolt Andre Gorz, a disciple
of Sartre, describes so poignantly in The Traitor. Here is a confession
which, as Sartre points out in his foreword, is not concerned about the
requirements of art but interested solely in exposing the nothingness in
which the self is hopelessly situated. Gorz wrote in order "to get rid of
his existence."7 Once he decided to stay alive, he had to find a meaning
for his life, but what could that be? His life, he concluded, could have
only one meaning, "that of not having any. When you cannot keep
from crying out though you know you will not be heard, you may as
well decide that this cry which has no meaning has a meaning insofar
as it has none - that it is in itself its own absurd meaning."8 Finding
that life has no meaning for him, Gorz is actually writing about the
non-meaning of life, trying to demonstrate "that all roads are blocked
save this one - this demonstration itself, and the remedy it provides
against the experience it contradicts."9 Logic defeats itself: if nothing is
of any importance, "then the consciousness that nothing has any im·
portance, has no importance."10 Here, then, is a literature which, like
the fiction and the plays of Samuel Beckett, is delicated to the God of
Nothingness. In composing this metaphysical soliloquy, The Traitor,
Gorz is seeking to objectify the absurdity of the universe, since he knew
that God, the universal, did not exist.
Though T he Traitor ends on a note that glorifies the authenticity
7 Andre Gorz, The Traitor. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1959, p. 184.
8 Ibid., p. 188.
e Ibid., pp. 37-38.
)0 Ibid., p. 180.
of the work of art and sounds a spirited call for the creation of a new
and better world, this resolution, in view of all that has gone before, is
not particularly convincing. For the vast systems of social engineering
on which modern man centered his utopian hopes - Comtism, Marxism,
science-failed to materialize or, if they did, they failed to satisfy his
metaphysical longing. Science could not serve as a surrogate for the
death of God. Henceforth man would live not in the shadow of eternity
but in the confines of history. And how could creative man adjust him-
self to this loss of the Absolute? He did so at first by deifying Reason.
Now he is situated in the matrix of a culture that has thrown off the
myth of the supernatural. As Andre Malraux points out in The Voices
of Silence: "The art of living religion is not an insurance against death
but man's defence against the iron hand of destiny by means of a vast
communion.... Our culture is the first to have lost all sense of it, and it
has also lost its trust in Reason .... "11 When man loses God, he is nailed
on a cross of despair from which he feels he will never be taken down.
Time will not redeem him nor history justify the passion of his ex-
istence. Once he sees himself as only a part of Nature and yet somehow
alien to it, he ceases to be "heroic."
Since he is no longer a son of God, he feels himself alienated in the
universe. The religious struggle of our time, as it works itself out in the
context of literature, is essentially a struggle over the soul of man. Just
as the naturalistic interpretation of character as the product of the
combined forces of heredity and environment fails to do justice to man
in his subjectivity, his life of spirit and striving, so the social delineation
of character gives but a limited picture of his inner potentialities. For
there is in man a vertical as well as horizontal dynamism, an upward
reach of vision, an existential involvement in becoming, a craving not
to be denied for transcendence. But how can he possibly fulfill this
craving in a universe that has been stripped of the supernatural?
Nevertheless, this aspect of his being continues to haunt him and will
not let him go. Whatever science may disclose about the structure of
the physical world he still persists in his search for meaning; he will
not abandon his effort to know, if he can, the ultimate truth about
himself. Not satisfied with the limitations of his socioeconomic role
he engages, in ways peculiar to himself, in this defeated quest for a God
in whom he does not believe. Dylan Thomas declared that his aim was
11 Andre Malraux. The Voices of Silence. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. New York:
Doubleday and Company, 1953, p. 496.
10 THE LOSS OF FAITH
to produce "poems in praise of God's world by a man who doesn't be-

lieve in God." 12
In short, it is not God but God's world that is to be praised, whereas
with Ivan Karamazov the situation was reversed: it was not God he
rejected but the world he created, a world based on suffering and
injustice. The decline of religion in our age has thus wrought a pro-
found change in the creative vision of the writer. As T. S. Eliot, a poet
and critic who is sensitively aware of these traumatic changes in the
spiritual climate of the twentieth century, says in On Poetry and Poets:
The trouble of the modern age is not merely the inability to believe certain things about
God and man which our forefathers believed, but the inability to feel towards God and
man as they did. A belief in which you no longer believe is something which to some
extent you can still understand: but when religious feeling disappears, the words in which
men have struggled to express it become meaningless l3
In this perceptive analysis of the spiritual dilemma of the modern

writer, Eliot, a devoutly orthodox Anglo-Catholic, employs distinctions
that are characteristic of this age of doubt: a belief in which one can no
longer believe; a belief that can be grasped by the understanding but
that is cut off from the deep sources of religious feeling; the desiccation
of the precious symbols that were once spontaneous and universal car-
riers of meaning.
That is exactly what happened: the advance of atheism transformed
not only the consciousness of the writer but also the language that is
his medium of communication. He cannot simply liquidate God and
accept the liberating gospel of scientific rationalism. He is not even a
blasphemer, for he lacks the energy to believe in his disbelief; his
denial of God does not culminate in a desire to elevate man to the
vacated throne. Unlike Shelley, who was inspired by the Promethean
myth, he cannot denounce Jupiter, the tyrant of the world; he cannot
rejoice that the painted veil of life is torn aside and that the loathsome
mask of religion has fallen; the intense inane that Shelley contemplated
with such Platonic rapture has become the source of extreme spiritual
despair, as modern man beholds the specter of nothingness.
There is the paradox that strikes an ambiguous note right at the start
of our investigation, for the God over whose murdered body the
Zarathustrian Nietzsche rejoiced is very much alive in the cultural
tradition of Western Europe and the United States. There is the blind
e John Malcolm Brinnin. Dylcl11 Thomas in America. Boston and Toronto: Little.
Brown and Company. 1955, p. 128.
13 T. S. Eliot. On Poetry awl pnets. New York: Farrar. Straus and Cudahy, 1957, p. 15.
alley in which a number of writers are caught. Like H. G. Wells, the

apostle of redemption for mankind through the use of intelligence and
the instrumentalities of science and technology, they have come to the
realization that the world is at the end of its tether. If the race is to be
saved from collective suicide, it is the heart of man that must be trans-
formed, but how is that transformation to be effected? In the name of
what transcendent principle? What moral order shall modern man
affirm, what high purpose shall he strive to carry out, what faith is to
sustain him in his quarrel with God and the universe? And if God is
dead, then the problem of bringing the theme of transcendence with
aesthetic "rightness" into the design of fiction or drama becomes stu-
pendously complex. The resolution of the tragic conflict cannot be
imposed from without, by resorting to some deus ex machina. Oppres-
sed by the terrors of history, the contemporary hero cannot plunge out
of time into the kingdom of eternity. All literature today which deals
with the spiritual dimension (and how can it be left out?) must be a
dialectical struggle between affirmation and denial, the divine and the
human, the Absolute and Nothingness.
In contemporary fiction God often appears as a quality of blackness,
a source of ontological emptiness. Whereas Camus, in The Stranger,
delineates a new Ivan Karamazov, a "hero" who has abandoned all
faith in the future, all belief in immortality or conventional moral
values, Joyce's fiction is instinct with elements of blasphemy. Stephen
Dedalus, the apostate who prefers to worship the truth rather than the
divinity of Christ, forsakes Catholicism for the religion of art. For him
the artist supplants the function of God; he "remains within or behind
or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence,
indifferent, paring his fingernails." 14 The hero of A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man has chosen to become an artist rather than a
priest. Or if he remains a priest at heart, it is as "a priest of the eternal
imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant
body of everlasting life."15 But even his aesthetic heresy is charged with
the metaphor of the faith he has abandoned; the sacrament of the
Eucharist still haunts his imagination. For he is still afraid of the
unknown and esoteric symbols in which mankind in the past projected
the image of God. He neither believes nor disbelieves in the Eucharist,
and yet, as Cranly points out dispassionately, it is a curious thing how
14 James Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young .Mall. New York: The Modern
Library, 1916, p. 252.
15 Ibid., p. 260.
his mind is supersaturated with the religion in which he says he dis-

believes. 16
It is his integrity as an artist that Dedalus is resolved to maintain at
all costs. It is not the God of the Roman Catholic Church he fears if he
were guilty of making a sacrilegious communion. "I fear more than
that the chemical action which would be set up in my soul by a false
homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of
authority and veneration."17 He has no intention, of course, of be-
coming a Protestant. What kind of liberation would that be, he asks,
to forsake "an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace
one which is illogical and incoherent?"18 It is freedom he craves, and
he is not afraid of making a mistake, even if he will suffer for it for the
rest of eternity. Though he refuses to kneel in prayer at the bedside of
his dying mother, Stephen Dedalus has not yet thrown off the Catholic
faith in which he says he disbelieves.
In his debauchery at Bella Cohen's brothel, the ghost of his mother
rises from the grave and urges him to repent. At first he is frightened,
but his proud intellect asserts itself and he asks her to tell him the
worst. Her pious rehearsal of the ancient orthodox formula of faith
repels him. He will have no part of God. Here is the blasphemer whose
cry is UN on serviam!"19 He is determined not to be "saved," not to be
shaken in spirit by the fear of death or the fear of hell. His positive act
is not to yield to the power of institutionalized superstition or authority
but to proceed always from the known to the unknown, to affirm him-
self as a conscious and therefore autonomous and sovereign being.
Camus's hero, Meursault, has gone much further than Stephen
Dedalus; he is through with the spooks and goblins of theology, the
abstractions born of the supernatural. There is only this life in the
present, the eternal that is fulfilled in immediacy or not at all. In a
secularized universe of the absurd, the only thing man can be sure of
is his life now. Hence Meursault rejects all moral and spiritual absolu-
tes; he will make no effort to justify his action in killing the Egyptian
on the beach. He is sentenced to die not because of the murder he
committed but because he displayed no sign of grief at the funeral of
his mother. It is this evidence of perverse impiety which leads to his
conviction. Meursault is the absurd man who is filled with amazement
at the strange spectacle of life on earth.
18 Ibid .. p. 282.
17 Ibid .. p. 287.
18 Ibid., p. 287.
11 James Joyce, Ulysses. Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1926, p. 545.
Camus is nevertheless a "religious" writer 20 in his search for an

authentically human faith. If he turned against the Christian mythos
it was because, like Ivan Karamazov, he could not accept a God who
permitted the innocent to suffer. Camus does not reject Christianity on
intellectual grounds alone; he is not a fanatical rationalist. In his case,
it is not science that has conditioned man to give up his faith in the
supernatural. "In fact," says Camus, "modern unbelief is no longer
based on science as it was at the end of the last century. It denies the
faith of science as much as that of religion." 21 Modern unbelief, he
contends, has reached a point of passionate intensity. While this may be
true of Camus, it is emphatically not true of the unbelieving genera-
tion of writers in our time. For them unbelief is not a passion but a
metaphysical disease.
Even fiction that is avowedly naturalistic in content and method
betrays this persistent concern with the numinous, with what lies
behind the veil of appearances. In the twenties, The Sun Also Rises,
the novel which became the testament of the lost generation, stresses
Hemingway's obsession with time, the inexorable march of the years
toward the bourne of death. Jake Barnes is filled with a sense of
religious wonder but his capacity for responding to the experience as
he feels he should is totally lacking. He cannot pray, and not because
he feels particularly sinful. Neither his words nor his soul is able to
soar, for his thoughts remain below. When he tries to pray, all sorts of
irrelevant associations thrust themselves into consciousness. He prays
for his friends, for himself, for the bullfights and the fiesta, but all he
can say about Catholicism is "that anyway it was a grand religion, and
I only wished I felt religious .... " 22 The wish is enough to indicate that
this Catholic hero with the wound that incapacitates him for the act of
love, has lost his religious feeling.
The motif of alienation from God comes through clearly and
consistently developed in A Farewell to Arms. When Lieutenant Henry
is wounded, he makes no religious appeal. When the priest comes to
visit him in the hospital, they talk about God. The priest declares that
in his country it is understood that a man may love God. The Lieute-
20 See Charles I. Glicksberg, "Camus's Quest for God," in Literature and Religion.
Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1960, pp. 212-222.
21 Quoted in Philip Thody, Albert Camus. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1957, p. 140.
1957, p. 140.
22 Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises. New York: The Modern Library, 1926,
p.100.
nant replies: '1 don't love."23 Though the hero rejects the religious
issue as a species of illusion, it is very much alive in his consciousness.
He is tormented by the fears that come surging forth in the dark of
night, the progression of time, the terror of death. These are the
matters of ultimate concern that are touched upon, in characteristic
Hemingway style, by indirection.
These examples furnish incidental evidence of the collapse of the
Absolute in the twentieth century. Western man, alone in the universe,
has to face the knowledge, the pain of which is not to be eased by any
metaphysical or mystical doctrine of transcendence, that he is doomed
to die. Not even the gods can save him from this fatality. Under Chris-
tian as well as secular and scientific auspices, this is the mortal element
in his being that drives him to seek avenues of escape, and the art he
produces is one expression of his revolt against this iron hand of desti-
ny.
Through the long centuries of civilization man has struggled to
wrest from chaos and render imperishable those images which will
affirm his dignity and worth as a human being and bear witness to his
grandeur. That is how, through the mediation of art, he makes the
repeated effort, gallant even if abortive, to rise above the indignity of
death. His work will at least outlive the envious erosion of time. Even
in the face of death he keeps faith with his creative mission and com-
poses a message that will reach down to posterity and pierce to the
heart of the mystery that is life.
The realization that God was dead, as this book will try to demon-
strate, meant more than the relinquishment, however painful, of a life-
sustaining concept. In the past religious belief had entered actively and
fairly completely into the process of shaping the forms of life. What
was taken away from twentieth-century man as he absorbed the lessons
taught by such sciences as geology, biology, astronomy, and anthropolo-
gy, was not an abstraction, an idea of the divine; his whole universe of
consciousness was transformed, and henceforth his vision of life on
earth would be drastically altered. From the moment he ceased to
believe in the miracle of the Incarnation and the equally necessary
myth of the Resurrection he could expect no privileged treatment, no
special dispensation; he knew at last that he was at the mercy of natural
forces that had no concern whatsoever for his anthropomorphic il-
lusions.
23 Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms. New York: The Modern Library, 1929,
p. 76.
Alone in the time-space continuum he knows now of a certainty that

none of his subjective wishes can ever influence the course of events.
He is a part of Nature, and yet Nature is indifferent to his moods and
cravings, not caring which species survived in the furious struggle for
existence. Unlike the animal, however, he is a victim of time, sensible
of the passage of the years and, cut off forever from the divine source,
aware of the nothingness of the grave. And the writers of today are
afflicted with this metaphysical nausea. God is, as in Waiting for
Gada!, a shadow of desire, an empty word, a promise of hope that
will never be kept. Nevertheless, modern writers, even as they repudiate
God, wrestle with the religious problem, but the image of God they
invoke is compounded of negation. Or else they indulge, like Joyce, in
the dialectics of blasphemy. In either event, what they give utterance to is
is the desolateness of the despair they feel in a world abandoned by God.
God is dead but the "religious" impulse persists: the quest for the
Transcendent that is beyond all reason and beyond all proof. Not that
the figure of God ever enters constitutively into the body of literature.
Since God remains invisible and unknowable, the writer must of
necessity confine himself to the universe of the human, the realm of the
sensuous, the temporal, the finite.
Nevertheless, the knowledge of the absence of God makes a tre-
mendous difference in the way a writer responds to the challenge of
existence and interprets the nature of man. As Paul Tillich cogently
states the problem: "Whatever the subject matter which an artist
chooses, however strong or weak his artistic form, he cannot help but
betray by his style his own ultimate concern, as well as that of his
group, and his period. He cannot escape religion even if he rejects
religion, for religion is the state of being ultimately concerned. And
in every style the ultimate concern of a human group is manifest."24
If this interpretation is correct, then religion, the state of being ulti-
mately concerned, pervades every sphere of experience and expression.
Even negative reflections of life, the outcropping of the demonic, are
essentially religious in their confrontation of reality. All that matters is
the degree of courage and honesty with which the writer faces the
mighty challenge of being. "He who can bear and express meaningless-
ness," according to Tillich, "shows that he experiences meaning within
his desert of meaninglessness."25 Tillich and Andre Gorz, though they
2, Paul Tillich, Theology of CIIlture, New York: Oxford University Press, 1959, p. 70.
25 Ibid., p. 75.
begin with radically different premises, arrive at substantially the same

conclusion.
This is the challenge to which modern man must somehow respond:
how to bear and express meaninglessness in a universe that seemingly
functions efficiently as a machine, without the presence of God. He
confronts a cosmos which appears to be inexplicably absurd, and how
shall he make his peace with the myth of absurdity? He has given up
the vain desire to merge with the Wholly Other, this futile nostalgia
for the Absolute, but he cannot give up the quest for identity. As man
conceives of the world, so he conceives of himself. The equation is re-
versible: as he interprets himself and his relation to God, so in large
measure he interprets the world.
CHAPTER II
GOD AND THE ALIENATED SELF
1. THE lOSS OF FAITH
The modern writer looks within and finds no essence that he can
identify as the self, no stable, coherent entity to which he can refer all
decisions and which remains unchanged through all the vicissitudes of
time. He is a bundle of memories; he cannot and none of his characters
can annul the past. His perceptions are apperceptions, but he can
discover no unitary, enduring self. He is forever changing, his moods
running the gamut from one end of the spectrum of feeling to the other.
The self that is delineated in the work of nevelists like Faulkner and
Samuel Beckett is not integrated. It is like a ghost that dissolves when
it is caught in the focused light of consciousness. Hence a number of
writers as they explored this complex problem of selfhood came inde-
pendently to the conclusion that the self per se does not exist; it is a
psychological phantom, no more than that, a metaphysical spook.
In the past when faith rode high, the self functioned as a controlling
center, a power within the organism that sifted and structured the
streaming mass of sensory impressions from the external world. Not
only philosophy and psychology required the presence of a mediating
self. Religion, too, needed a self, endowed with a conscience, that would
act out on earth the drama of sin and salvation, guilt and repentance.
This self was supposed to persist not only in this life but in the next,
whether in heaven or hell. And how, asks Pascal, can one face the
prospect of annihilation without fear? As Pascal gazed curiously into
the heart of the universe and beheld miracle upon miracle, he realized
that man must sacrifice his rash, presumptuous pride. The ultimate
secret of things is hidden from his limited understanding. The more
man makes of himself the first object of knowledge, the more fully he
perceives the vanity and impotence of reason, for a man cannot possibly
get to know the whole of creation of which he is only a part. Hence the
folly of those who, like Descartes, made too profound a study of
science and dispensed with God in their philosophy. Christianity assigns
the self an important place and responsible function in the commitment
of faith.
But if Christianity salvaged and reaffirmed the sovereignty of the
self, it did so at a price. The soul could serve as a channel of communi-
cation with the absolute, but the mystic could be united with God only
if he suppressed his finite self. As Everett W. Knight penetratingly
analyzes the problem in Literature Considered as Philosophy:
If this is true, then a loss of confidence in the existence of the absolute should be accom·
panied by doubt as to the reality of the Self, at least as traditionally conceived. And this
is what in fact occurred. There could be no grounds for fearing the absurd in the outer
world if we could be sure that in us there was a piece of the world, solid and reassuring,
a "thing" that could be labelled good or evil. 1
The progressive loss of the religious consciousness, the growing

process of secularization, generated an inner sense of insecurity. A
revolution in the conception of the self was bound to affect the tradi-
tional religious attitude. By the same token, a radical relinquishment
of faith in the absolute called for a transvaluation of values in the
psychology of the self. Reacting against the dominant assumptions of
their society, a number of writers came to realize how unmotivated and
"gratuitous" many of their actions were. The demons of the irrational
had broken loose; the forces of the unconscious now clamored for
recognition. And this insight, in men like Dostoevski and Nietzsche,
came before the advent of Freud. One did not first layout a compre-
hensive plan of life and then adhere to it with rational consistency.
On the contrary, into every destiny there entered elements of the
unpredictable and the incalculable. Though indiscretion might serve
better than the deepest plots, the modern writers could not subscribe
to Hamlet's belief that
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will...
Thus it followed that to fit the self neatly within a Procrustean bed
of categories and principles was, actually, to make it rigid, armored,
insulated against the electrifying shocks and hazards of reality. That
was how to shut out those aspects of experience which could not be
1 Everett W. Knight, Literature Considered as Philisophy. London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1957, p. 107.
GOD AND THE ALIENATED SELF 19
reduced to the coordinates of reason and the mandates of the moral

law. The deeper the writers peered with unrelenting introspective
honesty into their own being, the more perversely did this mysterious
self elude them. Much of romantic literature in the nineteenth century
consisted of an attempt to penetrate this insubstantial reality of the self,
a penetration which repeatedly was foiled because there was no way of
getting to know or to project this protean and elusive self. Who was
the observer or the observed? How, Yeats asked, can we know the
dancer from the dance? There was no invariant self that rationally
made all the decisions and took upon itself the entire burden of res-
ponsibility. The thrust of subjectivity, the dawning awareness of the
relative, the growing perception of the universe of the absurd, all this
began to make itself disturbingly felt in literature. The "gratuitous act;'
like "the double thoughts" which Dostoevski describes in The Idiot,
becomes a constitutive part of the life of characters in the weird, phan-
tasmal world of fiction. The single, harmonious self ceases to exist.
Characters no longer possess definite spatial dimensions within, depths
within depths or height upon height, which can be searched out; they
are what they do.
In portraying the psychology of "the underground man," Dostoevski
had explored hitherto unvoiced facets of the subterranean self, reveal-
ing the irrationality and rebellion of an isolated, impotent nonentity.
This "underground" rebel is not governed by reason or moral values;
he suffers from lack of recognition, from being cooped up in some
cellar or hole. His suffering, negative in its rage, is his "protest" against
existence. He rebels against a geometric or Euclidian universe. Notes
from the Underground brought the introspective anti-hero to birth
in Russian fiction. He is the alienated and rejected man who is bent on
revenge against a society that has mutilated him. Here, described with
profound imaginative sympathy, is the outbreak of the irrational, the
rejection of the cult of progress and the dream of utopian perfection,
the repudiation of the future Kingdom of Heaven, the confession of
spiritual bankruptcy and despair. The world of reason is blown up and
makes way for the universe of the absurd. The world no longer makes
sense, conforms to no meaningful pattern. The underground man has
given up the search for meaning. He is the nihilist who has thrown off
all the anachronistic trappings of morality. In a world that is devoid of
meaning, nihilism is inescapable. Nietzsche and Dostoevski join hands
in celebrating the modern dance over the fire and water of futility.
Notes from the Underground prophetically pictures the state of man in
20 THE LOSS Of fAITH
his spiritual dereliction, without any firm attachment to life or belief

in God. All the enshrined values of the past have been shattered, and
now everything is permitted. Why not? There are no absolutes which
can hold the underground man in check. He is free to deny life.
The underground man is thus a prototype, as Robert L. Jackson
points out in Dostoevskys Underground Man in Russian Literature, of
the modern Existentialist hero.;! He is in a state of permanent rebellion.
This nihilist of the underground anticipates the myth of the absurd and
foreshadows Katka's neurotic, anxiety-ridden heroes. In Notes tram the
Underground, Dostoevski offers a tragic diagnosis of the condition ot
modern man; it is a concentrated cry of despair that is not counter-
balanced, as in Dostoevski's later work, by any religious affirmation. He
pictures the bitter suftering the underground man must endure, without
any prospecc of a reprieve, much less a solution. The freedom he seeks
is freedom from all those conditions that make his situation hopeless -
mathematical reasoning, scientific control, the law of self-interest, the
tyranny ot nature. Impotent as he feels, imprisoned within walls he
cannot break down, he will not acknowledge the law of necessity. Out
of sheer perversity his sel£ acts against its own advantage. He runs to
irrational extremes, not restrained by the Christian doctrine ot renun-
ciation and sacrifice, all in order to deny that everything in the universe
is determined.
Thus, in an age of nihilism, the self is fractured, broken into warring
elements, palsied with doubt and indecision, no longer sure of itself.
An age that is skeptical of all absolutes can do no more than ask ques-
tions; it can hit upon no satisfactory solution to its existential dilem-
mas. Negatively the naturalistic writers of our time are convinced that
there is nothing beyond nature. Man is unique in many respects but in
the end he turns to dust just the same and he cannot enlist nature as a
partner in his transcendental aspirations. His ideals, like his gods, are
but projections of subjective needs: human, finite, and, alas, illusory.
The physical universe has no concern for his ultimate destiny. Energy
streams through space, throbs in animate and inanimate matter, but it
is, as Hardy insisted, a blind mechanical force. Through science men
have uncovered some of the secrets of the atom, but they have utterly
failed in their search for a meaning or a purpose that would justify
their existence on earth.
The man of today is plagued by a sense of his own unreality in a
2 Robert Louis Jackson, Dostoevsky's Underground Man in Russian Literature. The
Hague: Mouton & Co., 1958, p. 15.
cosmos that baffles his understanding. He is terrified by the thought

that his life may be snuffed out at any moment. And if he dies, then
his personal identity is forever annihilated. On all sides he is besieged
by legions of metaphysical terrors. The writers who voice these obses-
sive terrors persist in asking questions for which there are and can be no
final answers. What is the nature of the self? Why is man trapped?
What is to become of him? What are the frightful (and why frightful)
shapes and shadows lurking in the darkness? In The Waste Land, Eliot
describes the drouth and desolation of the modern spirit, the dry sterile
thunder without rain, the disillusionment with time that is always time,
with place that is always and only place, the disintegration of the self.
Now he prays to forget "These matters that with myself I too much
discuss," for he does not hope to turn again; he wishes to sit still, but
the terror remains, and the desolation, in this time of tension "between
dying and birth." Eliot makes the creative effort, which is governed by
the aesthetic principle articulated in his essay on "Tradition and the
Individual Talent," to escape from emotion, to throw off the burden
of personality, to suppress the fractious self, to live not merely in the
present but in the light of the eternal.
Kierkegaard has been vastly influential in our time because he taught
writers the art of indirect communication, the value of heightened sub-
jectivity. He taught them, too, the true meaning of irony as a literary
device, profoundly complex, a method which springs from the aware-
ness of the religious seeker that the grounds of faith are terribly in-
secure and irrational. Faith is the realm of the paradox; it involves the
transcendence of the power of reason, the belief in eternity which can
never be proved but without which man cannot live. The absurdity of
faith in God haunted Kierkegaard all his life long. And through faith
g-ained in immediacy after reflection, he did not extinguish the self but
acquired a wonderfully intensified sense of life. He found the meat of
meaning, the heart of truth, in subjectivity, thus undercutting all the
reproaches of logic. What Kierkegaard feels. what he experiences
subjectively, is the truth. What is the self but a process of becoming.
The self does not exist as a preformed entity; in every instant it is that
which is to become. Each man is involved in the struggle for existence,
and each choice he makes is crucial. Faith alone is the road to salvation,
and faith comes from within.
Kierke!!aardian subjectivity provided a number of writers with a
method that could combat the naturalistic discipline which arose out of
the scientific attitude, though the self as becoming, the self as transcen-
dence, was a conception alien to a social order which reduced people

to things and submitted to the fetishism of commodities. The con-
viction that life is meaninglessness, coupled with the feeling that civili-
zation is doomed, had intensified the modern awareness of the noth-
ingness of the self. That is why Heidegger, despite his forbidding
metaphysical jargon, has left such a powerful impression on the minds
of an important group of writers.
A nihilist who bids man confront his death knowingly and by so
doing learn to live authentically, Heidegger presents a self that is
projected inevitably toward a future which culminates in death. His
philosophy emphasizes the reality of death and the truth of Noth-
ingness. In a universe that is relativized, in a world of time and process,
man is no longer a privileged being, but a victim, seeking in vain to
rise above nothingness. No matter what noble possibilities he attempts
to fulfill, they may be suddenly destroyed by the intrusion of death.
The supreme value of life for Heidegger is death. That is the fate
which man must embrace in a spirit of heroic fatalism. That is how
he arrives at the truth of existence.
2. THE KA FKA UN I V E R SE
Independently of Heidegger, Kafka in Prague, who had more in

common with Kierkegaard, was writing fiction which mirrored not
only the incomprehensibility but absurdity of existence. No writer
illustrates more poignantly the disintegration of the self that has taken
place in our time and the consequent loss of the sense of reality that
this entails. Kafka as a Jew, a particular kind of Jew, experienced
inwardly the process of alienation that Kierkegaard had described so
hauntingly. For reasons that inhered in his temperament, he could not
feel any bond of kinship with his fellow Jews. He was no Zionist and
shared no strong communal ties. He scarcely possessed sufficient
strength for himself alone. He could not settle down in marriage and
live as others did. What had he in common with Jews? "I have almost
nothing in common with myself, and should hide myself quietly in a
corner satisfied with the fact that I can breathe." 3
The Kafkaesque self, like the tormented self that is revealed in the
work of Kierkegaard, prophetically foreshadows the epidemic of alien-
ation that would follow. What kind of self does Kafka portray in his
diaries, stories, novels, and letters that makes it so expressively modern?
3 Max Brad, Franz Kaf/ea. New York: Schocken Books, 1947, p. 45.
It is a self that is rootless, homeless, dismayed in a universe that is

meaningless; a self that is godless, stripped of the garments of faith,
the prayer shawl and the phylacteries, without hope, like a patient
stricken with a fatal disease and knowing that he must die soon. For
such a self, time is disorganized, and the sense of the imminence of
death is oppressively painful. It is this fixation on death that makes
the ordinary concerns of men seem so indescribably absurd. Long
before Camus, Kafka elaborated the myth of the absurd into a meta-
physic and an aesthetic principle, or rather his literary art embodied
both.
The power of his fiction resides in its portrayal of man as prevented
from understanding his condition on earth; the absurd Kafkaesque
"hero" raises questions and engages in the quest for knowledge and
seeks to get in touch with the mysterious rulers in the castle on the
heights, but inwardly he realizes that all his efforts are in vain. He is
unworthy and he is guilty, though he cannot say of what. The portrait
Kafka draws of the deracinated Jew, at home nowhere in this incredible
world, hated and accursed for no fault that he can make out, despised
and exiled even though he belongs to "the chosen people," gives a
vivid picture, steeped in ambiguity and in the acids of irony, of the
condition of modern man. It is this Existentialist motif of the split and
suffering self that emerges with compulsive intensity in the fiction of
the twentieth century: in the work of such novelists as Gide, Faulkner,
Sartre, and Camus.
In Kafka's imaginative world, as in the underground inhabited by
Dostoevski's "anti-hero," the self is shorn of reality; it is meta-
morphosed into an insect which must crawl in shame and guilt under
furniture until finally it dies of neglect and starvation. Gregor Samsa,
the outcast of society, resigns himself to his miserable fate. There is no
God to whom he can appeal. The spectacle of the indignity to which
man is subjected on earth, like a cockroach who incurs the loathing of
all who see him, offers a tragicomic parable of the wretchedness and
insignificance of the human creature when viewed against the backdrop
of the infinite.
In The Trial, Joseph K. is summoned to stand trial by powers that
have no concern for his innocence or his individuality. Unlike Meur-
sault in The Stranger, never once does he break out in revolt. He can-
not assert his will; he can only live in anguish, self-condemned, his
own enemy, incapable of mastering the anonymous world that is so
hostile. His deeper self is reduced to a state of trembling impotence,
doomed to die like a dog without any God above to intercede for him
or to protect him. As Rene Dauvin writes in analyzing this novel:
Faith is dead; men, whether Jews or Christians, have killed it. Life is set adrift. Man is
nothing more than a wreck; he must find his reason for being in himself, at the very core
of his existence which intellect has reduced to the condition of an abstract category .... He
sinks into absolute nihilism. because he cannot find a remedy for this anguish in religion
or the inoffensive world of day-to-day existence.'
The Castle reinforces this sense of the absurd, the realization that man
is an alien on earth, without a destiny or a sustaining sense of self. It
seeks justification, this spectral and absurd self, from powers that
remain invisible and incomprehensible.
There is good reason why Freudian critics discover in Kafka's writ-
ings such a fascinating and fruitful field of exploration: dreams, sym-
bols, morbid obsessions, myths, sexual images, oedipal situations, re-
current fantasies whose underlying psychological motivation can be
exposed by the reductive method of psychoanalysis. Not that Kafka
was deliberately ambiguous; all art, like existence itself, is riddled with
ambiguity. Like Kierkegaard, Kafka found the existential hieroglyphics
of the soul so densely charged with mysterious and for him irreconcila-
ble contradictions that he composed fiction as disordered in its denial of
familiar reality as the scenario of a dream. The fiction lived because
Kafka succeeded in lifting his private obsessions and metaphysical neu-
roses to the plane of art. His writing confesses the measure of his
spiritual defeat: the unavoidable doom of man in a universe without
God and therefore without ultimate meaning. Kafka was a pioneer in
shadowing forth the polarity of the self, the amazing profundities and
perversities of the human soul.
It is not surprising that the modern age has given birth to the neu-
rotic character, the sufferer from gratuitous guilt and alienation, the
tormented Kafka "hero" crucified by self-consciousness. The con-
temporary writer is faced with the choice of taking the path that leads
to introversion, the way of Kafka, or of remaining within the orbit of
the naturalistic outlook. The reasons for the extraordinary Kafka vogue
are not hard to fathom. There is, first of all, the eager search for the
unknown, the mysterious, the numinous. Second, there is the powerful
sense of metaphysical guilt that persecutes this generation of intelligent-
sia, its feeling of helplessness before the ambiguous but appalling
problem of evil. Third, Kafka attracts those who, like Samuel Beckett,
, Angel Flores and Homer Swander (eds.), Franz Kafka Today. Madison: The Uni-
versity of Wisconsin Press, 1958, p. 159.
wish to explore the unplumbed, immeasurable depths of the self, which

remains forever shadowy, indefinable. Finally, there are the Kafka
arcana, the intricate maze of symbols, as grotesque and haunting as
one of Salvador Dali's Surrealist paintings. The potent influence that
Kafka still wields at present can be attributed to one chief cause: the
contemporary disintegration of values, which has led so many writers,
as a measure of compensation, to seek out the mystical. Kafka's con-
fessions of frustration, anxiety, and his persistent vision, instinct with
paradox, of cosmic absurdity, are a fitting commentary on their own
deep-seated insecurities.
Kafka arouses hostility on the part of a number of critics not
because he is so hopeless in his Weltanschauung but because he is so
pitifully confused. The tragic vision voiced by various writers in the
past from Sophocles to Shakespeare and Eugene O'Neill did not detract
in the least from the bracing quality of their genius. Kafka, however,
is a neurotically frightened man, trying all sorts of incantations and
dream-techniques to shrink completely into himself and thus escape
from the conflicts of this harsh world. His neurosis, in fact, derives
principally from this split in his being: he cannot escape from himself
or from the world of reality. His novels and stories bear all the stigmata
of his crushing neurosis, suggesting unmistakably the horror-haunted
outlines, wavering and disoriented, of a schizophrenic universe. If The
Metamorphosis is symbolical of the "fallen" state of most men today,
their abject sense of worthlessness, their loss of identity, their ex-
perience of being cut off from the Ground of Being, The Castle is the
Expressionistic classic of schizophrenic isolation.
Unquestionably the most marked characteristic of our death-driven
age is its agonizing spiritual confusion, its lack of centrality and
significance. There is no answer as to the why of things. The quest for
meaning is from the outset doomed to failure. There is no faith in the
possibility of faith. Like Kafka, many contemporary writers simply
raise questions for which, they realize, there can be no answer. Kafka's
parables, as Walter H. Sokel concludes in The Writer in Extremis,
"express the innermost truth of an age which has learned that the
nature of answers is the posing of questions." 5
5 Walter H. Soke!, The W"iter in Extremis. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959.
p. 232.
3. ANDRE G IDE AND THE GRA TV I,TOV S ACT
Like Kafka, Gide was an author in search of a self that did not
exist because it was forever changing. He sought to write with un-
compromising sincerity; his characters are troubled by deep-cutting
conflicts: they love and hate, affirm and deny, reach upward toward the
divine and sign compacts with the Devil. Contradictions, in short, are
the essence of the new complex self, which is not to be reduced to
coherence. Proust at least took for granted the continuity of the self, a
continuity preserved by the persistence of memory. Proust pictures the
life of the mind in all its flashing cross-currents of desire and feeling,
its mobility and mutability. He paints the pilgrimage of the self as it
alters with time and the accumulated pressures of memory. With deep
insight he probes into the hidden facets of the personality, with its
plurality of selves. Nothing is fixed or final; everything is in flux. But
the self endures, even though each one exists alone, unable to emerge
from himself. Man is locked in the cell of his subjectivity and cannot
escape. The only thing that exists for him is what he feels. Things are
what they are because we are as we are. Reality is a purely subjective
construction.
Gide goes far beyond that. The sensations come from without and
penetrate the character; it is no longer the self that shapes the contours
of reality. Gide is no one and everyone, everything and nothing. He is
an evanescent mood, a flow of emotions and sensations. Man has no
fixed center; he is not what he thinks he is. He cannot even rely on
his introspections, which distort the truth of being. The self is a
phantom, the product of desire or belief. Man is saddled with the
creative responsibility, born of freedom, of forging his own self. If he
is to put his limitless freedom into action, he must strive to realize
his potentialities to the full.
Other novelists besides Gide decided to discard the unitary con-
ception of the self, to abandon the luxury of introspection, which
heightened their isolation. They wished to become a dynamic part of
the world of men, but action, too, was hemmed in by their awareness
of the absurd. In the name of what goal was the hero to act? How
could he be purposefully active in an absurd universe? There were only
things, no fixed self, no God, no Absolute. Each act was therefore
gratuitous, not to be judged by its relationship of consistency with what
had gone before. A new standard of "sincerity" had to be drawn up.
One must act spontaneously, without reflection. One acts "gratui-
tously," out of an impulse that cannot be controlled, without conscious

awareness of the real motivation. The decision is made in the dark.
This is extremely close to the Freudian theory of the unconscious
and, as we shall see, to Dostoevski's revelation of "irrational" acts in his
novels. The self is no longer in charge of behavior. The psychology of
the gratuitous act is, of course, grounded in atheism. If God exists, then
there is no room for freedom of will or the exercise of virtue. In a
universe created and governed by God, every human action is de-
termined or else it is conditioned by the desire to be rewarded in the
life after death. "The glory of man and the source of his uniqueness in
the scheme of things is not his reason, considered as a means of at-
taining an Absolute, that is, of suppressing the gratuitous, but his
freedom to be totally disinterested." 8
Gide wished to break away from the artificial, arbitrary, socialized
self that is the fine product of reason. His novels attempt to show that
there is no real substratum of selfhood. As Edouard declares in The
Counterfeiters:
I am never anything but what I think myself - and this varies so incessantly, that often,
if I were not there to make them acquainted, my morning's self would not recognize my
evening's. Nothing could be more different from me than myself.?
What is significant in this confession - and others very much like it

are to be found in Gide's Journals - is that Edouard, like his creator,
possessed a decentralized ego, a disembodied self that is constantly
examining its own motives and that is permanently haunted by a sense
of its own unreality. Edouard makes this further entry:
It seems to me sometimes that I do not really exist, but that I merely imagine that I
exist. The thing that I have the greatest difficulty in believing in, is my own reality. I am
constantly getting outside myself, and as I watch myself act I cannot understand how a
person who acts is the same person who is watching him act, and who wonders in
astonishment and doubt how he can be actor and watcher at the same moment.8
Here we can observe the complex process of the disintegration of the

human personality at work. Each one feels alone, cut off from God and
from the rest of humanity. Man is an object but without the reality
that things possess - an object, not a soul striving toward the goal of
transcendence.
Inexorable in his pursuit of the truth of man, Gide does not draw
back from the consequences of the irrational. It was his obsession with
6Everett W. Knight, Literature Considered as Philosophy, p. 119.
7Andre Gide, The Counterfeiters. Translated by Dorothy Bussy. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, Inc., p. 64.
8 Ibid., p. 65.
the "acte gratuit," which involved him in a conception of God that

became overshadowed with satanic ambiguity, a God who is non-moral
as well as unpredictable.
4. MOD ERN MAN INS EAR C H 0 F HIS LOS T S ELF
Modern man knows that he stands alone, but his alienation from
the world of Nature is a terrifying experience. Rootless, spiritually lost,
he feels that his only way out is to establish ties of human solidarity, to
accept human responsibilities, and thus create a humanized universe.
Unfortunately he must struggle hard to discover his sense of identity, to
become an individual as distinguished from the mass. He needs to
belong to "society" but he also has need to affirm the self that he has
lost. How shall he recover it? The disintegration of the ego, the suf-
fering of the divided self, has from the time of Dostoevski been the
engrossing subject of drama, poetry, and fiction, but not until the
twentieth century did writers accept so completely the picture of the
individual as isolated, fragmented, powerless in himself, tormented by
the senselessness of life. With the break up of the old spiritually unified
community, the individual becomes depersonalized and anonymous,
like a prisoner in a concentration camp who is identified not by name
but by number. He is altogether alone, a character in search of his lost
self, living from moment to moment in the flux of immediacy. If he
acts on the assumption that the affirmation "I am I" is false, then how
can he achieve any consistency in his behavior?
The horror of life in the twentieth century, the two world wars, the
gradual perfection of the technological weapons of destruction, the rise
and spread of totalitarianism, all this hastened the advent of nihilism
and accentuated the widespread feeling of futility. How, in such a
cultural climate, could the writer possibly feel at home? As George
Orwell expressed it with challenging trenchancy in Such, Such Were
the Joys:
To say "I accept" in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration camps,
rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches,
purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs. press censorship,
secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films, and political murders.9
This is the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four made real. In an age of

totalitarian dictatorship freedom of thought and expression is an im-
9 George Orwell, Such, Such Were the Joys. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1953,
p. 163.
possibility, and the self is transformed into a meaningless abstraction.

This has ceased to be a culture in which either literature or the authen-
tic self can survive.
Orwell's gloomy interpretation of the contemporary world was a far
cry from the utopian fiction that had drawn such a gratifying picture of
the triumphs man could attain in the future. How was this ideal con-
summation to be brought about? Scientific conditioning could work
on the minds of the citizens and shape them according to the wishes of
the leaders of the State. That is the wretched anticlimactic outcome
Aldous Huxley forecast in Brave New World. The individual is to be
completely identified with the State, no longer concerned about his
immortal destiny or his personal happiness. These were some of the
political, technological pressures that turned twentieth-century man
into a commodity, a thing, and therefore void of self. But no one can
be denied a self and not suffer from the affliction of anxiety, the sick-
ness unto death, that both Kierkegaard and Kafka describe.
For man still continues to be faced with the dismaying contradiction
of life and death; the knowledge that he must die casts a dark shadow
over every moment of his existence. Death is the supreme enemy. In
opposition to all the forces in his environment that hemmed him in and
transformed him into a machine, the Existentialist writer resolved to
face the truth of existence in all its tragic consequences, his aloneness
in a universe that cared not a whit for his needs. In the future he would
have to solve his own problems, without taking refuge in any spiritual
absolutes. Under the Christian dispensation, man was punished if he
was guilty of violating the laws of God, but what is modern man to do
when he is confronted by the vision of Nothingness? He has no self
that he can call his own. Though he seeks to flee from the confron-
tation of the truth, there is relief in finally doing so, for his struggle
was essentially not an evasion of the external world but a denial of self.
The experience of denial is not only costly but intolerable. Each one
is bound at some time to ask himself: "What do I live by? What is it
that keeps me going? What are my primary incentives and ultimate
concerns?" The problem is fundamentally related to the question of
identity. The one thing axiomatic in Existentialist thought, without
need for further proof, is that the self, no matter how elusive, exists
and the feeling that it exists. If it is true that "I exist," then, as Gabriel
Marcel declares in The Mystery of Being, "the 'I' cannot be considered
apart from the 'exist'." 10 There is the immediacy of self-awareness.

Only the life of feeling is unmistakably our own; the "I exist" remains
the touchstone of existence, the subjective certitude no logic can shake.
Yet this Existentialist self is most acutely aware of the loneliness of
the human situation. The self is forced to grope its way blindly in the
darkness of the universe. Unique and incommunicable, each self must
"make" its own world and determine its own fate within the limits of
what is given. This constitutes the dreadful gift of freedom man
inherits, and it accounts for his persistent sense of anxiety and anguish.
Because the Existentialist hero remains cut off from communion with
his kind, he suffers from the peculiarly modern malady of alienation.
Though he acknowledges, as indeed he must, the presence of "the
given," his chief concern is with the state of his inner being, and he
therefore remains confined within a dark prison of subjectivity. The
universe pictured in Being and Nothingness, by Sartre, is egocentric,
non-social, solipsistic. l l
What is the self, after all, when it is obvious that the future will
annihilate the present self, and yet that is the direction in which the
present self urgently moves. Day after day, each one sloughs off the old
and makes himself anew. All is mutability, in the psychic as well as in
the physical universe; all is flux; nothing endures. The mysterious and
irrational individuality of each character in Sartre's fiction is revealed
in each of his tendencies, but each tendency also points beyond itself;
each man chooses what he is struggling to become.
God is no longer a problem, a point of reference; the absolute has
ceased to exist. Sartre's heroes insist that they must remain uncompro-
misingly loyal to themselves. Freedom is the singular craving and
obsession of the Sartrean man. He cannot help but indulge in endless
introspection and self-analysis. In The Age of Reason, Mathieu suffers
from a strange form of spiritual masochism. He is unable to forget
himself and yet he cannot decide who he is. Though he repeats to
himself that he is because he wills, he is incapable of acting decisively.
The impotent intellectual at the mercy of life, he cannot act, he cannot
lose himself in love or pleasure or politics; wherever he is, he continues
to feel that he is somewhere else, not at this place. He is the victim of
a continuing and compulsive process of depersonalization. He can
10 Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being. Translated by G. S. Fraser. Chicago: 1950,

p. 90.
11 Iris Murdoch, Sar/re. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953, p. 51.
adduce no reasons for acting in a given manner, and he cannot yield to

mere impulse.
Sartre presents a striking portrait of the demoralized middle-class
intellectual, his will to act inhibited, his religious faith extinct, a nihilist
who is the victim of his own consuming passion for self-dissection. It
is this pertinacious habit of reasoning and reflection which poisons the
fountains of his existence. Even when Mathieu makes a spontaneous
gesture he repudiates it the next moment, unable to recall why he had
acted as he did. The upshot is that he gradually loses all sense of reality.
Above all, he cannot escape from the sense of his own nullity. There
he is, immured in the dungeon of his own self, inquiring if freedom is
real or illusory, and yet stoutly maintaining that whatever takes place
it is by his own agency that it must happen. He must choose his own
damnation; "there would be for him no Good nor Evil unless he
brought them into being." 12
In The Reprieve, we behold Mathieu drawn into the war. He now
realizes that in the past his difficulties lay solely within himself. The
war had swooped down and crushed his future to nothing. What was
this self to which he had clung so obstinately and so lovingly through
all the years? He feels he has lost his soul; his identity has been des-
troyed. The self is nothing. Finally he perceives that the freedom he
had sought was in fact in himself, but the discovery of this truth only
fills him with anguish. He is nothing and yet condemned to be free.
His freedom was for naught.
Unquestionably this retreat into the fastness of the self represents a
serious danger; one can perish in this arctic solitude. The Existentialist
hero acknowledges no collective and no transcendent duties and obli-
gations. He remains eternally alone. He must pass through the crucial
experience of estrangement and in that way, in his aloneness, overcome
the vast indifference that is death. Though Sartre makes the effort to
affirm the uniqueness of the individual, he is held back by the difficulty
of showing how subjectivity can confer meaning on the world. He is
a rationalist who believes neither in God nor in Nature. The truth,
however painful, must be faced, and reason in the only weapon man
possesses in dealing with a world that is intractably absurd. The
individual is the sole and supreme locus of value, but he can embrace
no positive faith, no categorical imperative. Even reason is impotent
12 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason. Translated by Eric Sutton. New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1947, p. 320.
and proves disenchanting. Sartre, like Camus, unflinchingly discloses

the unhappy consequences of dwelling in a godless world.
5. THE ABSURD SELF
In a purely secular world, its framework of meaning relativized, the

nature of man - or at least the manner in which he regards himself and
his relationship to the cosmos - changes radically. The hero ceases to
be heroic and becomes, like Dostoevski's underground man, the anti-
hero. The writer who brings these unheroic or anti-heroic figures to
life no longer believes in the vicarious immortality that the work of
art confers. He introduces characters who expect nothing, who have
come to see that death is the implacable and always victorious foe of
man. It is death, as we have insisted, that is the source of meaningless-
ness, the key to the modern myth of the absurd.
If the absurd hero rejects both idealism and religion, he is not, para-
doxical as that may seem, without a faith that bears him up, but it is
humanistic in its rationale, without any "higher" justification, save
insofar as it prevents needless suffering and helps to contribute to the
triumph of life over death. These are the values the absurd hero cher-
ishes, life over death, reason over the irrational, even as he abandons
all thoughts of transcendence. In short, he is, like the Sartrean man,
resolved to live with his nihilism and affirm his being despite it, since
that is all he can ever believe in.
That is the species of lonely "heroism" of which he is capable,
though he does not call it heroic; he is undeceived as to its underlying
meaning or motivation. Whatever he does is prompted by the single
desire, consistent or not, to affirm life, to protest against the humili-
ating deprivation inflicted by death, to revolt against the tyranny, be
it of the universe or of power politics, which robs him of his individual-
ity and reduces him to an object to be exploited. From this issues the
ontological paradox on which the absurd hero stakes his being: pre-
cisely because his being is threatened on all sides will he fight against
"the plague." In The State of Siege, the Plague, a personified character,
has instituted a dictatorship that proceeds to impose a reign of terror.
The population is terrified, but Diego, like Orestes in The Flies,
conquers his fear of death and arouses the people to revolt. Not even
the plea of his beloved can hold him back from this act of sacrifice. In
the name of humanity he defies the evil of "the plague" and thus
liberates the town.
Thus the nihilist hero would strip people of their illusions while at
the same time his actions betray his efforts to transcend nihilism. That
is the task Camus set himself in The Rebel. Though he had given
expression to the philosophy of the absurd, he had been faithful to the
creative quest, celebrating the preciousness of life and refusing to judge
his fellow men. Whatever he wrote was designed to lessen suffering,
to teach people how, on this wretched planet, they might learn to
live. That is how Camus sought to rise above the myth of the absurd
that led inevitably to nihilistic conclusions. The Rebel is therefore, like
The Plague, an affirmation of man's need to revolt against all that
oppresses him.
Camus was not unaware of the contradictions that beset the artist of
the absurd, but he tried to resolve them by looking upon the world of
art as the world of human aspirations, the world of man in revolt. He
does not solve the problem, of course; the contradictions are not
removed. Even the absurd man, apart from the artist, knows that he
involves himself in a flagrant contradiction when he negates life; life
refuses to be negated. Camus's task as a novelist was to reveal how
man could bear his burden of human responsibility without belief in
God: precisely the task Nietzsche had set himself as a philosopher.
Camus did so convincingly in the character of Doctor Rieux in The
Plague.
6. THE F L I G H T FRO M S ELF I NTH E W 0 R L D 0 F

SAMUEL BECKETT
The Hemingway hero suffered a "wound," but he was borne up by a

code of honor, an innate sense of courage and dignity that enabled him
to endure pain without flinching. The Kafka hero is defeated and dies
like a dog. The Beckett hero is wounded all over. His physical incapa-
cities are but symbolic means of disclosing that he is practically dead,
perhaps he is dead. But quick or dead, he persists in his monologue. He
persists because there is nothing else he can do but seek and question
and brood and long for the silence that will bestow upon him the peace
he cannot believe will ever be his. He is, as consistently portrayed in the
body of Beckett's plays and novels, blasphemous and rebellious, even
if he is done for. Let the mysterious powers do what they will to
punish him, he will not cry quits. He is nothing but he knows he is
nothing, and that makes the difference. Not that Beckett denies the
value of opiates, the need for illusion, since life is a pain that will not
end, but no drug can long restrain the upsurge of revolt. The nameless
Beckett hero, be he Molloy or Watt or Moran or Malone, is all men,
past and present and to be. The madness of being will repeat itself
interminably, and since that is the case then nothing is left to man but
to assert his prerogative of inquiry, holding nothing back, searching out
the truth that can never be attained, but always, no matter what hap-
pens, pursuing the quest.
The Beckett hero represents the ne plus ultra of nihilistic dis-
integration. He cannot achieve identity. He knows and yet does not
know himself. The 'r remains an unutterable mystery. Pronouns are
tricky, ''1'' and in particular "they." 13 Beckett's Expressionistic fiction
reflects this desperate flight from the self, the radiation of the ego, but
it is an ego that has gone beyond the limits of understanding, a
consciousness that reaches beyond the categories of time and space,
metaphysics and religion. The ego is obliterated. "It's not I, I am he,
after all, why not, why not say it, I must have said it, as well that as
anything else, it's not I, not 1.. .. "14 The self has no reality, even though
the nameless protagonist reflects "there is no one but me, there was
never anyone but me." 15 Perpetually, in a monologic debate that can
never be settled, he questions his identity: "who is I, who cannot be I,
of whom I can't speak, of whom I must speak.... " 16 Haunted by shad-
ows and by phantoms out of the past, the ego is wiped out as it plunges
ahead toward an eternity of silence, the silence that must eventually
come and put an end to this madness of being, but then the self will not
be 1.
The spiritual lostness of the modern hero, whose identity is com-
pletely abolished, is highlighted by Bekett's treatment of the confusion
of space. The unrelieved hopelessness of the mythic quest is driven
home by Beckett's deliberate emphasis on the absence of all spatial
coordinates, so that up and down, near and far, advance and retreat,
forward and backward, going and coming, like past and future, are
deliriously confounded. Observe how he begins The Unnamable with
a series of questions that illustrate his method of "absurd" discourse:
Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving. Ques-
tions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on. Can it
be that one day, off it goes on, that one day I simply stayed in, in where, instead of going
out, in the old way, out to spend day and night as far away as possible, it wasn't far.
13 Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable. New York: Grove Press, 1958, p. 102.
14 Ibid., p. 16l.
15 Ibid., p. 162.
16 Ibid., p. 164.
Perhaps that is how it began. You think you are simply resting, the better to act when
the time comes, or for no reason, and you soon find yourself powerless ever to do anything
again. No matter how it happened. It, say it, not knowing what. Perhaps I simply assented
at last to an old thing .... I seem to speak, it is not I, about me, it is not about me. These
few general remarks to begin with. What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do,
in my situation, how proceed? By aporia pure and simple? Or by affirmations and
negations invalidated as uttered, or sooner or later? Generally speaking. There must be
other shifts. Otherwise it would be quite hopeless. But it is quite hopeless.17
The questioner here doubts his own identity and remains unbe-
lieving, reducing every query to a useless hypothesis, exhibiting the
indeterminateness and fumbling ineffectuality of the process of thought
as well as communication. Each shadowy doubt destroys itself by an
attack of further doubt, so that the one who speaks has no awareness of
self and rambles on at random, perfectly aware that he is babbling to
no purpose. But even if he realizes that the situation is quite hopeless,
the monologue never stops. The spoofing reference to "aporia," like
the affirmations and negations that are sooner or later invalidated as
uttered, point to the uselessness of speech. There are no facts or events
to which the hero can confidently point; he must struggle to "speak
of things of which I cannot speak," 18 but never for a moment does he
give up the struggle. Despite all the epistemological and linguistic
obstacles to be overcome, despite the realization that utterance is a vain
effort, the hero is obliged to speak out, even if he has to speak of things
of which he cannot speak. "I shall never be silent." 19 Though there is
neither affirmation nor denial, only a baffled sense of wonder that
includes both within its dialectic, the monologic voice is never and
can never be silent.
In the extremity of their dereliction, their inability to discover any
principle of justification in life, the modem writers continue their
monologue. That is the saving grace of their nihilistic revolt. Whether
they know it or not, their monologue, which, through the mediation of
art, becomes a dialogue, is a celebration of the mystery of life. Is human
existence absurd? Is life meaningless? Has the self lost its identity, its
power to affirm "I am I"? Is love but a polite euphemism for the
coupling of animals? Nevertheless, long live life! The tragic pessimism
of modern literature is born of the knowledge that the universe con-
forms to no moral order and exemplifies no pattern of divine justice.
Even the experience of love has lost its sacredness for the alienated self
in a profanely secular world. How can Eros live when God is dead?
17 I bid., pp. 3·4.
18 Ibid., p. 4.
19 Ibid., p. 4.
CHAPTER III
EROS AND THE DEATH OF GOD
I
In The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm draws an interesting correlation
between the death of God and the disintegration of love in Western
civilization. On the surface the thesis is not one for which we can find
an abundance of confirmatory evidence, and yet a deeper study of its
implications reveals that the debasement of love, its systematic and
widespread devaluation, is indeed closely interrelated with the loss of
religious faith. Fromm examines the interrelation from one point of
view: the loss of the spontaneous self and the consequent decline of
spontaneity in love. In religion, too, the concept of God that man
professes to worship is mechanical and idolatrous. No longer sustained,
as of old, by the traditional theistic faith, the character of man is badly
split. If he turns to God it is not with instinctive faith but with a
frightened, compulsive longing for security. Thus he leads a double,
alienated life. God is present principally as a means to implement his
drive toward greater economic advancement.
Fromm does not touch upon the psychological consequences of the
loss of faith in God. The progressive disappearance or diminution of
faith in God is accompanied by a loss of faith in the possibility of
achieving a genuine love experience. Love, like God, is a sham, a myth.
Love is sex, nothing more, a physiological function. The rest is an ela-
borate species of idealization, fed on the ennobling rhetoric of romance
and conventional make-believe. The passion of the body is palpably
real; the passion of the soul is, at best, only a daring metaphor.
The whole issue of the "free" treatment of sexuality in literature is
based on the conviction that man is an animal, and this, in turn, relates
to the writer's conception of the nature of man. If man is no more than
a creature responding to the pressure of instinct, then he is not made
in the image of God. If sexuality is an expression of life at its most
intense, then it is sex that defines the self. Robert Elliot Fitch, in The
EROS AND THE DEATH OF GOD 37
Decline and Fall of Sex, presents this thesis and then develops it to its
logical limit. If the self is identified with sex, then the denial of sexual
consummation is the height of tragedy. Here emerges the redemptive
doctrine of the lost generation during the twenties, the "religion" di-
vinely revealed by the numinous Priapus: "Sex is Life. Sex is the Self.
Sex is the Resurrection and the Life." 1
Yet man can abandon his faith neither in God nor in love without
feeling the loss as a profoundly traumatic experience. He yearns for
God even as he denies the possibility of God's existence and, like
Norman Mailer, experiments with fiction that will celebrate the
apocalyptic orgasm. He craves the transfiguring assurance of love even
as he pours contempt upon such sentimental twaddle. The struggle
persists: the dialectics of the search for a love that transcends bodily
union and the tyranny of sexual hunger.
But once God dies, the other gods also vanish from the pantheon,
and the God of Love, too, becomes a casualty. It then becomes a mark
of iconoclastic courage to announce the primacy of the physical, to
dethrone deity and set up biology as lord and ruler of life. The victory
is never, alas, a completely satisfying one. Not that modern man can
revert to the Christian sex ethos, which disprizes the flesh and denoun-
ces woman as the incarnation of sensuality and sin. As far as literature
goes, the Pauline dispensation is not one that would appeal to the
major writers of our age. On the other hand, they are manifestly reluc-
tant to accept Kinsey's statistical revelations on the copulatory fre-
quency of the male or female human animal. The zoological emphasis
is as distressing - and obviously as false - as the ascetic one.
The death of God was bound to have fateful consequences for the
future of morality in the culture of the West. For if no supernatural
power controlled the operations of the universe, if evil was not punish-
ed and good rewarded in the afterlife by some system of divine calculus,
then thinking men, as Dostoevski passionately pointed out, would
realize that everything was permitted, though actually this was far
from the truth. Recognizing their aloneness in the cosmos, they would
be compelled to take upon themselves full responsibility for shaping
their own destiny on earth. Nietzsche, in Joyful Wisdom, had sounded
the glad tidings of deliverance from ascetic ideals, the triumph over the
Christian God. No longer would man look upon Nature as exhibiting
proof of the goodness of God or upon history as exemplifying a moral
1 Robert Elliot Fitch, The Decline and Fall of Sex. New York: Harcourt, Brace and
Co., 1957, p. 14.
order at work. Man now strives toward the goal of self-mastery. The
ascetic ideal had endeavored to provide an answer to the tormenting
problem of why man was placed on earth to suffer, and Christianity
sought to affirm the transcendent principle of suffering, but what was
the purpose of suffering? Since any meaning was better than no mean-
ing at all, Christianity continued to prevaiL But Nietzsche, fighting
against this religious "lie," this hatred of the human, this rejection of
the animal in man, sought, as we shall observe in the next section, to
view life aesthetically through the Dionysian-Apollonian rather than
Christian perspective.
Nietzsche, brought up in a pious household, had originally felt that
his importunate sexual hunger was the mark of evil, but he finally
outgrew that notion. His transvaluation of values revolutionized the
basis of sexual morality. It is when passion is regarded as essentially
evil that it becomes fouL
It is in this way that Christianity has succeeded in transforming Eros and Aphrodite -
sublime powers, capable of idealization - into hellish genii and phantom goblins, by
means of the pangs which every sexual impulse was made to raise in the conscience of
believers. Is it not a dreadful thing to transform necessary and normal sensations into a
source of inward misery, and thus arbitrarily to render interior misery necessary and
normal in the case of every man? 2
That is how Nietzsche violently attacked the regnant Pauline code of

chastity: it was an inducement to perversion. Deliberately to depreciate
the sexual life, to sully it by damning it as "impure," that, he cried out
in Ecce Homo, is "the crime against life - is the veritable sin against
the Holy Spirit of Life." 3 This was a daring assault and it struck home.
The patent fact remained that the sexual instinct, if denied a normal
outlet, turned perverse. The outlawing of sexuality infected the world
with a sickly conscience. Nietzsche fiercely decries this diabolization of
Eros. The free man would henceforth have to decide for himself what
was good and what was eviL Whatever made for happiness - that was
indefeasibly good; whatever stood in the way of happiness was eviL
The writers of the twentieth century, as they struggled to throw off
the burden of Christian morality, arrived at conclusions that were
equally iconoclastic. The reading of Tyndall, Spencer, and particularly
Thomas Huxley buttressed Dreiser's conviction that the Bible was not a
divinely revealed document and he threw off the trammels of religious
orthodoxy. If life was, as he consistently maintained, an inner physico-
2 F. A. Lea, The Tragic Philosopher. London: Methuen & Co., 1957, pp. 143-144.
3 Ibid., p. 144.
chemical series of reactions, then the role of ethics was actually non-
existent. The literary rebels were therefore compelled to revise radically
their estimate of the nature of man. We have already seen the trans-
formation that took place in the work of such men as Dostoevski, Gide,
Kafka, Camus, Sartre, and Beckett as they portrayed the warring contra-
dictions and irrational dichotomies of the alienated self. In interpreting
the nature of human nature, Dreiser dwells on the physiology of the
body, the dynamics of libidinal desire. Man responds as he must be-
cause of his instinctual endowment, his biological necessities, his cra-
ving for pleasure and his tendency to avoid pain. No hint of ultimate
purpose is to be discovered in the mysterious physical universe. Why,
then, postulate a fixed moral or religious order? Viewing himself as an
atom in a greater machine, Dreiser rejects all talk of "spirit." That is
the philosophical outlook embodied in his first novel, Sister Carrie, in
dealing with the complex problem of morality, the answer to what is
right and what is wrong, the conflict between conscience and sexual
instinct. That is how men and women, driven by appetite and necessity,
not borne up by the illusion of free will, actually behave. Robert H.
Elias subtitled his biography of Dreiser "Apostle of Nature," an aptly
descriptive phrase. For it was in the name of Nature that Dreiser and
the other literary naturalists led the revolt against the domination of
Puritanism, the age-old suppression of the life of instinct.
The sexual problem was not to be disposed of that easily. Though
modern man revolts against the Judaeo-Christian heritage in the sphere
of sexuality, he cannot cut himself off entirely from his cultural and
spiritual roots. In the name of Nature and Reason, he launches his
rebellion against the ascetic doctrines of Christianity, but he remains
restless and unhappy in this new bondage to his instincts. He wishes
to transcend - always there is this paradoxical urge toward self-trans-
cendence - his fallen state and rise above his biological limitations.
"Who," he cries out inwardly, "shall deliver me out of the body of this
death?" The metaphysical passion for transcendence that wars against
the ignominious compulsion of sex, is not to be denied. He is of the
earth earthy but he would fain soar to heaven, fly upward to the realm
of the Absolute, become transformed into pure Spirit. It is the prison of
the body of this death that renders his aspirations absurd and makes his
spiritual passion seem useless. The flesh impels him and the flesh
defeats him. The woman that gave him birth dooms him to death: the
womb is also the gateway to the tomb. As Simone de Beauvoir says in
The Second Sex: "Wherever life is in the making - germination,
fecundation - it arouses disgust because it is made only in being

destroyed; the slimy embryo begins the cycle that is completed in the
putrefaction of death." 4 That is the familiar and poignant cry of trans-
cendence the Christian fathers uttered again and again in battling
against the inexorable forces of Nature.
This in the main is the conflict that grips modern man. He has won
his charter of sexual freedom and acts proudly and confidently in behalf
of his instincts. No God rules sternly from on high to deprive him of
the gratification of his physical needs. No negative commandments can
henceforth transfix him with the agenbite of inwit, the harrowing
condemnation of sin. He is emancipated from the oppressive burden of
neurotic desire (Kierkegaard describes it in the first volume of Ei-
ther/Or and Kafka delineates it symbolically in many of his stories)
that is born of the fearful ethics of abstinence, but he is at the same
time frightened and repelled by the absolute power the flesh exercises
over him. If he glories in his spontaneous communion with the great
god Pan, he feels inwardly uneasy and incomplete because he has sur-
rendered his moral autonomy. If he is not the slave of unbridled pas-
sion, he is nevertheless the helpless child of instinct. He cannot hope to
escape his destiny as a creature, finite and mortal, born of death.
Fundamentally that is the reason for his divided attitude toward sex,
for the passions of the body, once they are spent in the service of
Nature, remind him that he is wedded to the bride of Nothingness, in-
dentured to death. Hence he is torn by these conflicting impulses in his
nature: the cravings of his sexual being and his imperative longing for
transcendence.
Modern man thus has to pay a high price for his liberation from
the repressive doctrine of original sin. Try as he will, he cannot get rid
of the metaphysical horror that the sexual act inspires in him, for it
confirms his realization that he is instinct incarnate, part of the energy
that pours through the veins of the cosmos. Though he seeks the ecstasy
of forgetfulness in the sexual embrace, he would, if he could, separate
himself from this brutish dependence on Nature, this lust in action,
what Shakespeare calls "the expense of spirit in a waste of shame." It is
through "the possession" of woman that he fuses with Nature, but
the act of possession proves strangely equivocal, if not disillusioning,
for he is not sure what he actually possesses. He subjects himself to the
fetish of virginity in order to insure his exclusive possession of woman,
4 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex. Translated by H. M. Parshley. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1953, p. 146.
but the more he broods upon love's bitter mystery the more surely does
he come to perceive that he requires vastly more than the assuagement
of his imperious instincts. Even as he loves he cannot get away from the
desolating knowledge that death is the inseparable companion of life
and the ultimate fate of man. The conjunction of birth and death, sex
and extinction, Eros and Thanatos, frustrates his reaching out for the
transcendence that he imagined the ineffable experience of love would
bring. Here is the mad yearning, the spiritual striving, that can never be
fulfilled. How can we say of any beloved person - here is absolute
beauty, here is the perfection that is God? It is blasphemous and absurd.
In one sense, as Santayana makes clear in Interpretations of Poetry and
Religion, all loves are tragic, "because never is the creature we think 'we
possess the true and final object of our love.... " 5
That is so, unless we accept the logical aberrations of a writer
like Vasili Rozanov, who was profoundly influenced by Dostoevski. Like
Kierkegaard but for strategically different reasons, he assailed not only
Christianity but the Church. God was his subjectivity, his mood, his
inner voice. The Thou whom he addresses is a peculiar God. For him
asexuality is the identifying mark of the atheist. All is born of passion,
spirit as well as talent. He is not to be taken in by the traditional cant
about moral laws. In a railway carriage he jots down this revealing
thought.
I am not yet such a scoundrel as to think of morality. A million years passed before my
soul was let out into the world to enjoy it; and how can I suddenly say to her: "don't
forget yourself, darling, but enjoy yourself in a moral fashion."
No, I say to her: "enjoy yourself, darling, have a good time, my lovely one, enjoy
yourself, my precious, enjoy yourself in any way you please. And toward evening you
will go to God."
For my life is my day, and it is my day, and not Socrates' or Spinoza's.6
Rozanov recognizes his fate as a stranger on earth, a predestined victim

of estrangement. He is alone, but what gives him strength to go on is
his mystical faith in the connection of sex with God. Here is a bold and
perverse metaphysical outlook, a revolution wrought in the sphere of
the religious. What Rozanov attempts to do is spiritualize sex itself.
As one critic sums it up: "His philosophy could in brief be defined as a
sort of sexual transcendentalism." 7
5 George Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. New York: Charles Scrib-
ner's Sons, 1900, p. 141.
6 V. V. Rozanov, Solitaria. Translated by S. S. Koteliansky. London: Wishart & Co.,
1927, p. 98.
7 Renato Poggioli, The Phoenix and the Spider. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1957, p. 162.
In order to achieve this startling reversal of values, Rozanov - how

else could he be consistent in his efforts to sexualize the spiritual? - had
to turn against Christianity because of its hostility to the life of the
senses. The modern writer is faced with a more or less similar problem.
Living as he does in the light of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, however
lapsed, he cannot simply decide to discard it and make an end of it. He
must settle his accounts with God even as he denies His existence. So,
paradoxical as it may sound, defiance of God constitutes an inverted
expression, as is true in the case of James Joyce, of the need for reli-
gious transcendence, of the will to affirm the God who is not. Indeed,
few of the important English and American writers of our time, par-
ticularly some of the naturalists who picture a universe that is me-
chanized and meaningless, are free of this desire, balked but intense, to
recapture the ancient unity of faith. Since they cannot achieve it, since
they live in a culture infected with the virus of doubt, they give voice to
their alienation from God by indulging, like Nietzsche, in violent at-
tacks on the heart of Christianity.
Inevitably their revolt takes the form of moral transgression, for
how else are they to demonstrate the militant sincerity of their dis-
belief? They will violate all the commandments of the Decalogue, yet
there is something obsessive - and suspect - in the desperate vehemence
of their sinning. Even in the brave manifestoes they compose on inti-
mations of immorality (one thinks of Andre Gide and his defence, in
fiction, of the gratuitous act), they betray their nostalgia for the Ab-
solute. If blasphemy is actually an inverted confession of an indwelling
need for God. then the modern cult of sinning, as it is portrayed in
literature, is often a protest against a world that is emptied of moral
order.
The one commandment which is most frequently broken - in litera-
ture at least, though the Kinsey Report assures us that it is true of
life as well- is the one which reads: "Thou shalt not commit adultery."
The literary iconoclasts reject the Pauline injunction against the lusts of
the flesh; they are not of the opinion that it is better to marry than to
burn. In fact, they do not allow themselves to suffer from the kind of
"burning" Saint Paul had in mind, since they have sacrilegiously torn
down the tabernacle of the moral law. Nature supersedes God. Or
better still, Nature, too, was fashioned by God. Therefore, there can be
no wrong in yielding to the solicitations of instinct.
Though sex in some form or other enters into all human activity and it
was a good thing that Freud emphasized this aspect of human nature, it
is fantastic to explain everything in terms of sex. But for the beat gene-
ration all is sex. Nothing is more revealing of the way of life and
literary aspirations of this group than their attitude toward sex. For the
beatnik, like the hipster, is in opposition to a society that is based on the
repression of the sex instinct. He has elevated sex - not Eros or libido
but pure, spontaneous, uninhibited sex - to the rank of the godhead; it
is Astarte, Ishtar, Venus, Yahwe, Dionysus, Christ, the mysterious and
divine energy flowing through the body of the universe. Jazz is sex,
marijuana is a stimulus to sex, the beat tempo is adjusted to the
orgiastic release of the sexual impulse. Lawrence Lipton, in The Holy
Barbarians, stresses that for the beat generation sex is more than a
source of pleasure; it is a mystique, and their private language is rich in
the multivalent ambiguities of sexual reference so that they dwell in a
sexualized universe of discourse. 8
II
If one wishes to measure the extraordinary revolution that has been
effected in the domain of sexual morality one has but to compare a
novel like A Farewell to Arms with The Scarlet Letter. What a dif-
ference is to be observed! Having committed the worst of sins, Hester
Prynne bears the mark of shame on her breast. An outcast of human-
kind. she stands alone, apart from mortal interests, arousing only
revulsion and horror in the people of Salem. But living alone, cut off
from society, companioned only by her child, the fruit of her trans-
gression, Hester gains an intuitive knowledge of the hidden sin in other
hearts and the insight enables her to reject the judgment of the com-
munity that turned her into a moral leper. "The world's law was no
law for her mind." 9 Hester is thus a rebel against convention, a
champion of oppressed, long-suffering womanhood. The martyrdom of
wearing the scarlet letter had brought her close to human truth. When
Dimmesdale, in the crucial meeting in the forest, declares: "We are not,
Hester, the worst sinners in the world," she whispers, "What we did
had a consecration of its own!" 10 Whereas Dimmesdale had committed
"a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose," 11 Hester is not
at all convinced she had been guilty of sinning.
8 The above paragraph is taken from an article by the present writer, "Sex in Contem-
porary Literature," that appeared in The Colorado Quarterly, IX (Winter, 1961), p. 278.
9 The Portable Hawthorne. Edited by Malcolm Cowley. New York: The Viking Press,
,.., 1.89.
. 10 [bid .. p .;on
11 Ibid" r. ;~).
But the twentieth-century heroine who commits adultery wears no

scarlet letter and, what is more, feels no sense of shame. T. S. Eliot, in
The Waste Land, shows how the whole romantic tradition of love has
been vulgarized as he describes the disenchanting mechanical sordidness
of sex as viewed through the eyes of Tiresias. In the affair of the young
man carbuncular who engages the typist in caresses which are un-
reproved, if undesired, there is no hint of beauty, no touch of exalting
passion. The epitaph on the tradition of courtly love is voiced in these
lines, with their ironic undercurrent of parody:
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smooths her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.
Hester, we can be sure, never did pace her room in this fashion or
smooth her hair with automatic hand. In an age of religious disbelief,
"love" becomes a mere physiological episode.
The moral evaluation of sexual experience shifts significantly from
age to age. The picture that Hawthorne draws of adultery and its con-
sequences in Salem during colonial times is poles removed from that to
be found in The Sun Also Rises or in The Sound and the Fury. In the
Victorian novel, adultery might be hinted at but was rarely dwelt upon
circumstantially. The Victorian writers were not guilty of deliberate
"suppression"; they simply did not believe that the sexual theme con-
stituted a legitimate and desirable part of literature. It took courage to
attack the Victorian conception of marriage, which held up the ideal of
complete obedience on the part of the wife. By the time George Mere-
dith composed Modern L01!e, the woman in the poem is accorded a
measure of equality in marriage. She is no longer the traditional scape-
goat. As Meredith writes:
The wrong is mixed. In tragic life, God wot,
No villain need be: Passion spins the plot;
We are betrayed by what is false within.
What the Victorians refused to face was the fact of immorality; the
world of sex and prostitution was discreetly veiled from the eyes of
readers of fiction. 12
The naturalistic novelist of the next century, on the other hand,
12 For a detailed study of Victorian sexual morality in literature, see Patricia Thomson,
The Victorian Heroine. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1956.
insisted that man is a child of Nature. Passion spins the plot with a
vengeance. The biological facts must be realistically faced in the light
of the knowledge that science has made available regarding the charac-
ter of man. Man comes of age when he frankly acknowledges his
animal origin and is not ashamed of his instinctual needs. Whatever is
"natural" is "right." To curb the instincts is the essence of "the unnatu-
ral." Creative health and wholeness is to be achieved through in-
stinctual fulfillment. The literary naturalists waged their battle in the
name of science and in behalf of a "higher" morality.
Not that they could bring to an end the struggle between the sensual
and the spiritual, body and soul, the carnal and the divine. The need to
justify physical love, to rescue it from the taint of imputed guilt, is
present in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. When Frederick and
Catherine fall in love, they feel no sense of guilt. Catherine already
feels married and tries to make him a good wife. As she confesses to
him: 'You see, darling, it would mean everything to me if I had any
religion. But I haven't any religion." 13 The emergency conditions of
war, the imminence of death, and the absence of God - all these make
the legal and ecclesiastical sanctions of marriage seem utterly irrelevant.
One must love while one can, while yet there is time, lest both life and
love be suddenly destroyed. Blasphemously Catherine declares: 'You're
my religion. You're all I've got." 14 He does not have to make an
"honest" woman of her. In keeping with the Hemingway moral code,
she says: 'You can't be ashamed of something if you're only happy and
proud of it." 15 That is the moral commitment which sustains her. They
are leagued together against a hostile, destructive world. When Cathe-
rine is lying in the grip of pain, Frederick broods bitterly that this is the
price people had to pay for loving each other. They had not sinned. No!
"It would have been the same if we had been married fifty times." 16
In his novels, Hemingway thus portrays this deep-cutting division in the
soul of man: his longing for love and his refusal to believe in it. Sex
is earthy and instinctual, a source of "natural" joy, but even sex consti-
tutes a biological trap and doom at the end when Catherine dies in
childbirth.
Long before Hemingway became a novelist, Gide had fought against
the Pauline morality of Christianity, seeking to curb his ascetic tendency
13 Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms. New York: The Modern Library, 1929,
p. 123.
14 Ibid., p. 123.
15 Ibid., p. 123.
16 Ibid., p. 342.
to yield only to those desires of which his conscience approved. Did God
require these heavy sacrifices on his part? In his search for sincerity, he
was forced to question this ascetic compulsion and to examine the stir-
rings of Nature in his being, the "laws" which governed his homo-
sexuality. In Africa, his Puritanism collapsed; he had to obey the man-
dates of Nature. An ascetic who was at the same time a fierce sensualist,
he looked back upon his former continence, in conformity to the
Christian norm, as essentially morbid. Though the teachings of Christi-
anity continued to suffuse his sensibility throughout his life and lend
subdety and dramatic tension to his work, he remained convinced that
instincts were not to be restrained by morality. In keeping with his new
ethic, he resolved to be faithful to his sensations and live with whole-
hearted and unpremeditated immediacy. Yet he could not altogether
silence the conflict in him between indulgence and abnegation, tem-
peramental freedom and spiritual control. For Gide God is equated
with change; God is instinct with the regenerative powers of Nature.
The authentic way of coming closer to God, therefore, is to yield to the
senses. Thus Gide, mystically exalting the life of instinct, the union of
flesh and spirit, achieves the paradoxical feat of celebrating the body in
terms of the spirit.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is, like The Way of All
Flesh, a classic novel of adolescence because it describes in circumstan-
tial detail the struggle of a young lad, Stephen Dedalus, against the
wicked temptations of the flesh. With remarkable imaginative insight
Joyce records all the torments of sex guilt the religiously trained young
hero suffers and the conviction which overcomes him that he is eternal-
ly damned. He stands condemned not only by the Church and the
voice of society but also by his own sensitive conscience. He feels
profoundly ashamed of his biological nature, the lascivious impulses of
his mind, the erotic fantasies that absorb him night and day, the inces-
sant pressure of instinct. In his polluted state, how can he ever feel
clean again and be worthy of entering the gates of Heaven when he
dies? There is the monstrous sin of sexual indulgence that robs him of
the joy of life and blots out the light of the sun.
By the time Joyce came to compose Ulysses, he had thrown off the
strong hold of Catholicism, though in his attitude toward the Mother
Church he suffered throughout his life from an incurable ambivalence
of feeling. Ulysses presents no scenes, except in the form of parody, of
romantic love. The characters in this novel are not inclined to dwell on
the spiritual perfection of the beloved. Worshipers of the Venus
Naturalis rather than Venus Coelestis, they are obsessed, often

obscenely, with the appetites of the flesh, the pursuit of instinctual
pleasure. Women are objects of carnal desire, not images of beatific
adoration. What makes for rich and often ribald irony is the ever-
present contrast between the conventionally exalted language of love
and the animal actualities of sex.
But if Joyce is a naturalist in stressing the compulsion of instinct and
the libidinous fantasies of the unconscious, there is no novelist whose
writing is more thoroughly steeped in the Catholic essence. That is why
sexuality in his fiction is portrayed as both a grievous sin and an
obscene joke. Joyce dwelt curiously on the sexual function in man, but
he could not divest himself of the notion that sex is something asso-
ciated with shame. And no writer of our time was more tensely aware
of the skull beneath the skin, the mortality that rounds out the pre-
cariously brief drama of desire. It is precisely because the characters in
Ulysses are so human, stricken with a sense of their mortality, that they
grasp so feverishly at the warm, breathing pleasures of the moment,
even as they realize that they should rise above the importunities of the
flesh. Out of this conflict between Nature and Spirit springs their
despair; they know they are doomed to die, and they know there is no
resurrection, no loving and no passion beyond the grave. That is why,
in Joyce's work, blasphemy, coupled with explosions of obscenity, plays
so important a part. That is why, too, sex in practically all his writing
is represented "as perverse and sordid animality." 17 The paths of
sexuality lead but to the grave.
Somewhat different is the Sex-Anschauung developed in Winesburg,
Ohio, which presents "grotesques" who react neurotically to their
diseased, industrialized civilization. Anderson writes about them with
unfailing compassion, identifying himself with their futile hopes, their
thwarted desires, their "queerness." The Anderson fictional world is
peopled by drunkards, misogynists, perverts, agnostics bent on destroy-
ing the idea of God, clergymen tormented by lustful thoughts, lonely
people suffering from all kinds of frustration. When Reverend Curtis
Hartman, pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Winesburg, is overcome
by carnal temptation, he cannot fathom the reason for its coming, but
his body is stronger than his protesting moral self, and acts against his
will. Finally, unable to bear this unequal struggle any longer, he
declares: "If my nature is such that I cannot resist sin, I shall give
17 J. Mitchell Morse, The Sympathetic Alien. New York: New York University Press,
1959, p. 41.
myself over to sin." 18 Cheated of beauty, joy, and love in his married
life, he comes in his defiance to the realization that man has no right to
forget his animal nature. Like Emerson, the arch-heretic of American
literature, he affirms that if he is the Devil's child, then he will live
from the Devil.
A more sensitive and complex expression of the rebellion of the
twenties is to be found in the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Beneath the
portrait he draws of the Jazz Age we perceive the churning undercur-
rents of spiritual lostness and despair, for the Fitzgerald hero, even as
he devotes himself to a life of pleasure, is seeking a way of redemption.
This Side of Paradise pictures the desolation and distress of a generation
headed for war and the realization that its old faith would be shattered.
But if the old values were discredited, perhaps love would provide the
remedy, and a generation of flappers plunged recklessly into the art of
doing what was forbidden. Fitzgerald shows, in The Great Gatsby and
Tender Is the Night, how the preoccupation of the Jazz Age with al-
cohol and sex was not without its accompaniment of neurotic break-
down and retributory horror.
III
But the writer who undoubtedly stands out in the popular mind as
the prophet of uninhibited sexuality is D. H. Lawrence. Hailing the
redemptive forces of the unconscious in which our being has its primal
roots, the spontaneous uprush of the dark instincts, he calls on man to
recover his rapport with the old chthonic gods, the power that resides in
Nature. Discarding the Jesus-myth in favor of pagan cults which arise
out of man's feeling of oneness with Nature, Lawrence preaches a kind
of revitalized animism: the recognition of the godhood that dwells in
rock and flower, in all natural life, the glory of the dark kingdom. Sex
is the vital spark of the flame that brings us closer to the primordial
sources of life. Profound instinctual release - that is what the experience
of love should mean. It should not be spiritualized and idealized till it
loses its earthy, sense-felt quality. Man can achieve wholenesss - that is
the heart of Lawrence's "religious" message - by resuming contact with
the world of the senses. 19 Reason is but a candle flickering feebly in the
primeval forests of darkness.
18 Sherwood Anderson, ·Winesbu,g, Ohio. New York: The Modern Library, 1947,
p. 180.
19 For an illuminating treatment of Lawrence as a "religious" Humanist, see Dorothea
Krook, Three T,aditions of Moral Thought. Cambridge: The University Press, 1959, pp.
261-292.
But Lawrence was not, from the start, preaching a religion of un-
trammeled and promiscuous sexual indulgence. As far back as 1922 he
declared that "Love is a much bigger thing than passion, and a woman
much more than sex." 20 His great religion, he announced, was a belief
in the blood and the flesh as being wiser than the intellect. In the
foreword he had intended to publish together with Sons and Lovers, he
pointed out that Adam was the first Christ, the Flesh made Word.
Everything that is creative and mysteriously potent comes out of the
Flesh, and the Flesh is beyond anything the mind can formulate. God-
hood is made manifest in the Flesh of Woman. Lawrence, like the
mystical Rozanov, is a heretic in his conception of Christianity. For
him, as he develops the idea in "The Risen Lord," Christ is embodied in
the Redeemer Risen in the flesh, not in the Savior Crucified. It is the
theme of Christ risen in the flesh that is developed in The Man Who
Died. It is not surprising that after the publication of this story Law-
rence was denounced as the enemy of God. Christ returned to the pal-
pitating wonder of life realizes that he was wrong in preaching his
gospel of salvation. He has not risen; his faith in the otherworld and
the afterlife has perished. Wandering along the roads of the Holy
Land, he beholds the passions that enslave men, their fear of death,
"the egoistic fear of their own nothingness." 21 It is then the priestess of
Isis brings him back to life, back to the glory and the true resurrection
of sexual union. There is the iconoclastic reversal of Christian teaching
of which Lawrence is guilty.
Yet this mystique of the Flesh made Word is not in the least in-
compatible with the fact that Lawrence was actually a Puritan at heart.
H he objected to a novelist like Galsworthy, it was because the latter
degraded sex in his desire to make it seem important. And that is
Lawrence's attitude throughout: he was revolted by those who ad-
vocated a perpetual orgy of sex. He deplored the sin-steeped view of
sex taken by Christianity, the reduction of all sex activity to a pro-
creative purpose, but he was horrified by the mistaken notion some
people formed that he was urging indiscriminate sexual indulgence.
H Lawrence continued to worship the dark gods (his last work,
published posthumously, was Apocalypse), Eugene O'Neill labored to
create a world of tragedy from which God had been extruded; in his
creative travail he brought into high relief the conflicts that arose in the
20 D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Edited by Aldous Huxley. New
York: The Viking Press, 1932, p. 45.
21 The Later D. H. Lawrence. Edited by William Tyndall. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
Inc., 1952, p. 420.
mind and heart of his characters for whom love was sundered from its
high religious sanctions. In Welded, O'Neill treats of a struggle be-
tween the human pair to redeem their love from the clutching vanity
of the ego, for both these protagonists, the playwright and his wife, an
actress, are haunted by loneliness, and it is only in the communion of
love that they become, or think they become, whole. They had lived
together for a number of months before they decided on marriage. Not
for them the family rite. "We swore to a true sacrament - our own - or
nothing! Our marriage must be a consummation of creative love,
demanding and combining the best in each of us!" 22 At the end, the
two lovers, their arms stretched out left and right, in mystical union,
form a cross. Here is a symbolic identification, inevitably frustrated, of
love with God, love with salvation. Love is a prayer and a crucifixion.
The effort to achieve wholeness in love is immensely more difficult
for those who are no longer able to embrace the traditional faith.
O'Neill repudiates not only the romantic illusion of love but also the
repressive code of Puritanism, with its demand for the rigorous sub-
jugation of instinct. In Strange Interlude, O'Neill sharply delineates the
conflict between the absolutism of religion and the absolutism of
science, the conflict between the God on the Cross (symbolically
treated in Days Without End) and the God of electricity (symbolically
presented in Dynamo). After the death of her puritanical father, the
professor of Greek, Nina Leeds had tried to pray to the modern God of
science. "But how could that God care about our trifling misery of
death-born-of-birth? I couldn't believe in Him, and I wouldn't if I
could!" 23 Why, she cries out in protest, was not God shaped in the
image of woman? If we had imagined life as created "in the birth-pain
of God the Mother," 24 then life would not have become so perverted
and death so unnatural.
After Nina finds herself pregnant, her mother-in-law, Mrs. Evans,
in a scene reminiscent of Ghosts and yet strikingly different in import,
reveals the powerful taint of insanity in the family. When Mrs. Evans
was bearing her son, she
used to wish I'd gone out deliberate in our first-year, without my husband knowing, and
picked a man, a healthy male to breed by, same's we do with stock, to give the man I
loved a healthy child. And if I didn't love the other man nor him me where would be the
harm? Then God would whisper: "It'd be a sin, adultery, the worst sin!" But after He'd
H Eugene O'Neill, All God's Chillun Got Wings and Welded. New York: Boni and
Liveright, 1924, p. 98.
23 Eugene O'Neill, Nine Plays. New York: The Modern Library, 1952, p. 523.
24 Ibid., p. 524.
gone I'd argue back again to myself, then we'd have a healthy child, I needn't be afraid ....
But I was too afraid of God then to have ever done it!" 25
But for Nina, who does not believe in God the Father, the act would
surely not be difficult. Purged by her suffering, Mrs. Evans has ceased
to believe in God. Why should she have been punished, along with
other folks, "for no sin but loving much." 26 At this point she sounds
the motif of naturalistic morality that Hemingway expressed in The
Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms: "Being happy, that's the
nearest we can ever come to knowing what's good! Being happy, that's
good!" 27 Therefore, it is Nina's "moral" duty to abort the child she
is carrying in her womb and find another healthy male to father her
child.
The experiment in eugenics works out magnificently but not accord-
ing to scientific expectations. The "operation" is successful, but the
doctor, not the patient, is the victim. Nina does not feel in the least wick-
ed because of what she has done. O'Neill is portraying the new woman,
no longer restrained by moral or religious scruples in her quest - in this
case it happens to be a neurotic, egocentric quest - for happiness and
fulfillment. Unfortunately the neurologist who has consented to be her
"scientific" lover, though he has fought against the plague of the
romantic imagination, has ruined his medical career. At the end he
decides to return to his study of unicellular life that floats in the sea and
is not afflicted with the all-too-human but disastrous craving for happi-
ness. It is then he cries out: "Oh, God, so deaf and dumb and blind! ...
teach me to be resigned to be an atom!" 28
In Strange Interlude we behold to what a marked degree the
compulsives of the old faith have been broken to bits and how the
characters respond to the pull of instinct. Where man was once close to
Nature, able to satisfy his instinctual needs, he suffered from no neu-
rotic torments, but once civilization supervened he became the victim
of repression. Though he accepted the necessity for sublimation, if not
renunciation, he could not get rid of his animal heritage. Uncompromis-
ing in its naturalism, Strange Interlude demonstrates how the realm of
spirit is overthrown, yet the scientific method is no safeguard against
the insidious power of romantic love.
To be sure, there are novelists and dramatists of the naturalist per-
suasion who, believing as they do that sex, like beauty, is its own excuse
25 Ibid., p. 545.
26 Ibid., p. 546.
27 Ibid., p. 546.
28 Ibid., p. 680.
for being, do not include any principle of transcendence in their reading

of life, but if they are faithful to their basic assumption that the truth
of reality must be interpreted in all its complexity and completeness
then in their portrayal of characters who are concerned exclusively with
the passion of the flesh they must show how in the end they fall of
necessity into spiritual despair. Fundamentally important in love is this
need for transcendence, which is, as Erich Fromm points out, ·'one of
the basic needs of man, rooted in the fact of his self-awareness, in the
fact that he is not satisfied with the role of the creature.... " 29 Unlike the
animals, man not only functions sexually but also seeks to understand
the experience of sex, and by means of his understanding he is able to
achieve some measure of control over instinct. Thus is born a sexual
morality which, whether or not associated with Christian ethics, trans-
cends the imperative of instinct.
Much of modern literature deals with the conflict that man faces
between his instinctual demands and his longing for transcendence. If,
at one extreme, he follows the precepts of Pauline Christianity and
denies the feverish hunger of the flesh, he cuts himself off from Nature
and thus becomes "unnatural." The writer who, like Aldous Huxley in
After Many a Summer and Time MUJt Have a Stop, draws back in
disgust from the copulatory activities of the human beast with the
double back and adopts an ascetic philosophy either falls into a didactic
strain or, in his rapt contemplation of the syllable Om, ceases to be
concerned about art at alL This is the struggle the sensitive man of the
twentieth century wages between instinct and the ideal, sex and spirit,
Nature and God. He must dwell in both realms: preserving his animal
heritage, his endowment of instinct, yet never ceasing to affirm the
spirit of striving that stirs restlessly within him to rise above the bio-
logical trap, for this is the mark of his humanity, the "spiritual" quality
that differentiates him from the animal kingdom. Though he is still
part of Nature, he endeavors to transcend it. He is the only animal who
is not enslaved by his sexuality. Despite Lawrence's dithyrambic in-
vocation of the dark gods, it is no longer possible for modern man to
return to the "natural" state, whatever that may have been. If he can-
not, at the risk of falling into neurotic illness, neglect to pay homage
to Venus Naturalis, he cannot forego his perennial urge to become one
with the ideal of aspiration, the object of all striving, that he calls God.
29 Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956, p. 51.
Though he has ceased to worship the God of his fathers, he continues

his march unweariedly "On, to the City of God." 30
But where was the City of God to be found? Alas, the search led him
through wastelands and ruins, war ravaged fields, towns and cities
gutted by aerial bombardment, concentration camps enclosed by barbed
wires, crematoria and close by the mass graves of millions of victims -
a horror-haunted landscape infinitely worse than any of the scenes of
torture Dante describes in the Inferno. Instead of reaching the Castle
on the heights, the modern seeker beholds appalling images of evil, the
apocalyptic symbols of disaster flaming against a blood-red sky. He
does not witness the flame in the bush, only the diabolical principle of
evil in action. It is the wife who, in Archibald MacLeish's play J. B.,
begs her husband, the modern Job, to blow on the coals of the heart.
The candles in churches are out.
The lights have gone out in the sky.
The second part of this book seeks to show how the God-sickness of
the age is dialectically embodied in the work of a number of writers,
from Kierkegaard, Dostoevski, and Nietzsche to Sartre and Samuel
Beckett.
30 Matthew Arnold, "Rugby Chapel."

PART II
THE SEARCH FOR GOD

CHAPTER IV
KIERKEGAARD AND NIETZSCHE
:. EXISTENTIALISM IN EXTREMIS
Of late a movement has sprung up which seeks to utilize the intuitions

of Kierkegaard in erecting a system of poetics. One critic, for example,
George Whalley in Poetic Process, explicitly acknowledges his in-
debtedness to the insights of Kierkegaard, and his style takes on a
mystical ring as he sets out to explore the creative process and account
for the miracle of expression that is the achieved poem. The function of
the artist, he holds, is priest-like; "through the laying on of hands, by
the ritual of ordonnance of the sensory material, a state of grace may be
induced in the reader," 1 when he is in a responsive frame of mind.
Thus a work of art, like a sacrament, makes possible a deeper and
more illuminating approach to reality. In short, art is now interpreted
as a vehicle of truths that are timeless and eternal. Between art and
religion there is a vivid, underlying connection that is to be found in
the integrity of the inner life of the poet.
But how can art, as Matthew Arnold had hoped, take the place of
religion? Can the poet become, as it were, the dispenser of aesthetic
sacraments, the high priest of art? Though it is obvious that art cannot
be used as a substitute for religion - that would be not only a sacrile-
gious confusion of categories but a perversion of Kierkegaard's basic
teachings - there can be no denying that a vital relationship exists, and
has always existed, between art and religion. But on what terms? How
does this relationship function in the shaping of a work of art? Which
is primary, the religious or the aesthetic impulse, and how do the two
streams of energy interpenetrate? What is the Kierkegaardian critic to
make of the artist's non-conformity, his curious addiction to the evil of
1 George Whalley. Poetic Process. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953, p. xxx.
See Charles I. Glicksberg, "Existentialist Criticism," Southwest Review, XLII (Summer
1957). pp. 187-195.
58 THE SEARCH FOR GOD
heresy, his refusal to bow before the Lord of Hosts? George Whalley
frankly acknowledges that his thesis at this point encounters serious
difficulties. He does not deny that art has its heresies, but he accounts
for them in a manner that is casuistic and far from convincing. These
eruptions of heresy in art are not
dogmatic diversions so much as the truncations of awareness, the rejection of responsi·
bility, the wilful assertions that are all comprehended within the single sin of pride, the
desolating game of playing at being God; these end in despair by a process of apostasy .... 2
Strange doctrine, indeed! Is the art of poetry to be judged by a series of

religiously grounded imperatives? Is art damaged by the presence of
heresy? Are we to assume that the religious vision produces the purest
and most sublime works of art?
George Whalley attempts to avoid these pitfalls of the doctrinaire
and the didactic by taking a higher stand. These heresies are an integral
part of the journey of the soul toward apprehension of the divine, to-
ward that communion with the ground of being which is beyond the
limits of language and understanding. For Kierkegaard, to whom Whal-
ley refers at this juncture, holds that every human being who is not
conscious of himself as spirit is bound to fall into despair. Thus we
come full circle: life lived aesthetically results inevitably in this impasse,
but life that is not lived aesthetically results in the death of art.
What then is the high responsibility to which the artist is commit-
ted? Is he self-sufficient, beyond good and evil, a law unto himself, in-
different, as Joyce would have him, to the spectacle of existence in all
its contrasts of light and darkness, comedy and tragedy, dedicated single-
mindedly to the task of revealing the truth imaginatively? Does art
come to us, as Pater declared in his conclusion to The Renaissance,
proposing to give nothing but the highest quality to our "moments as
they pass, and simply for those moments' sake"? 3 Here, from the
religious point of view, is the most dangerous heresy of all, the mark of
the artist's inordinate lust for power, his desire to usurp the role of
God, his hedonistic indulgence in the passion of immediacy. Art is not
an end in itself. Intelligence is not enough for the analysis of art nor is
sensibility alone a sufficient criterion of judgment. The critic must go
beyond and extend aesthetic sensibility, as T. S. Eliot demands, into the
sphere of spiritual perception.
Yet the religious Existentialist critic fails to take up the profoundly
important question of how the Kierkegaardian aesthetic can be made
2 George Whally, Poetic Process, p. xxxii.
3 Walter Pater, The Renaissance. London: Macmillan and Co., 1924, p. 252.
KIERKEGAARD AND NIETZSCHE 59
to work, how it applies to the creative process, how the poet as well as
the critic can make use of it and in what way, what its limitations as
well as its positive virtues are. For the Kierkegaardian "theology" is im-
mediately caught on the horns of a dilemma: how can the poet address
God directly? If God is conceived as the Wholly Other, then whatever
conception language forms of God - that he is not. As the Ground of
Being, He transcends and therefore negates all that the poet can say of
him. Thus religious mysticism is not only a flight beyond the limits of
reason but also the antithesis of art; it would fain rise above the plane
of the human and utterly dissolve the world of matter. In other words,
the mystical spirit, if it is carried to its highest point, seeks the Nirvana
of Nothingness in which art is reduced to a species of childish illusion.
The poet who beholds God has already transcended the aesthetic
stage, for the religious intuition is total and exclusive. Thus the price
the mystical poet must pay, if he carries his mysticism far enough, is
that he must disqualify himself from practising his art. How does
Kierkegaard deal with these contradictions?
His aesthetic speculations (and the term "aesthetic" for Kierkegaard
means any attachment to the world of the senses, the world of time,
which has not yet reached the ethical and religious stage) are intimately
bound up with his religious outlook. The subjective religious thinker,
unlike the sense-beguiled poet, perceives that it is impossible to esta-
blish a direct communication with God. Kierkegaard's stress is on the
incommunicability of the relationship between God and man - a secret
communion, a dialogue, that cannot be passed on to others. "Everything
subjective, which through its dialectical inwardness eludes a direct form
of expression, is an essential secret." 4
The Existential poet, if he is to create at all, must embrace the nega-
tive as well as the positive pole in his relation to the truth. For example,
the contradiction between the eternal and the process of becoming in
which the individual is involved can only be voiced negatively. Hence
the poet who penetrates into the depths of inwardness will not be
guilty of the folly of direct statement; instead, he will heighten his
awareness of the negative: namely, what Kierkegaard calls the ne-
gativity of the infinite in existence. The Existential poet, like the
subjective existing thinker, will constantly keep open "the wound of the
negative." 5 Thus "wounded," the poet will realize the ever-baffling
4 Soren Kierkegaard. Concludirl/? Unscientific Postscript. Translated by David F.

Swenson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941, p. 74.
5 Ibid., p. 78.
difficulty of framing even the simplest statement about existence. His

expression of sensibility will take on a dialectical character in terms of
process as he attempts to shadow forth that which must remain forever
unknowable and unutterable. As Kierkegaard phrases it pregnantly: the
supreme challenge of the Existentialist poet is make use of "the dia-
lectic of the infinite." 6
But if God in his absolute sovereignty has no need of man, if all
ethical development consists in unveiling ourselves before God, if the
process of developing subjectivity to its highest degree ceases only when
life ends, and if God remains inscrutable in his essence and in his pur-
pose, then, if all this is true, prayer, like poetry, becomes highly com-
plex and mysterious. God is not another person, someone external to
the self, whom one can address directly. God is the infinite itself, and
how can finite language, even symbolically, hope to capture intimations
of the infinite? Immortality, like God, can be apprehended only with
the passion of subjectivity that must struggle always with the element
of uncertainty. Subjectively, in the act of communication, the accent
falls not on what is said but how it is said. That is the way the truth is
approached and grasped, in the anguish of inwardness and in uncer-
tainty.
Out of the knowledge that God cannot be grasped objectively, out
of the oppressive sense of risk that attends the impossible quest for
faith, rises the specter of the absurd: the refusal to believe the miracle
that flagrantly contradicts the rule of reason, namely, that God has
become incarnate in man, that the eternal has entered the domain of
time. But the intensity of faith is measured precisely by the willingness
of the Existential poet to embrace the absurd and reject all objective
proofs. The absurd is an expression of the awareness that the In-
carnation runs counter to all human reason. Hence Christianity stands
forth as the ultimate paradox. The mystery that it enshrines remains a
mystery. 7
6 Ibid., p. 80n.
7 The mystery of the Incarnation is now be~inning to enter the field of literarv criticism
as a constitutive. if highly ambiguous. element. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr .. in the "Epilogue" to
Literary Criticism. advances the opinion "that the kind of literary theory which seems to us
to emerge the most plausiblv from the long history of the debates is far more difficult to
orient within any of the Platonic or Gnostic ideal world views, or within the Manichaean
full dualism and strife of principles. than precisely within the vision of suffering, the
optimism, the mystery which are embraced in the religious dogma of the Incarnation."
(William K. Wimsatt. Jr. and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf. Inc.. 1957, p. 746.) For a dialectically subtle and sympathetic analysis of Wim·
satt's Christian aesthetic theory, see Murray Krieger, The Tragic Vision. New York: Holt.
Rinehart and Winston, 1960, pp. 238-241.
KIERKEGAARD AND NIETZSCHE 6\
Yet thiS inwardness that creates the conditions conducive to faith

cannot be outwardly communicated. That is how to falsify it. It is an in-
wardness which is known only to God. If the poet attempts to com-
municate the experience, he must resort to ambiguity and paradox and
indirection. For God is infinitely adept in concealing himself and in
withdrawing from the possibility of any direct relationship. Thus an
immediate relationship is not vouchsafed to man. Nevertheless, the
separation from God acts as a means of intensifying the process of in-
wardness.
In Either / Or Kierkegaard has analyzed in detail the relationship
between the aesthetic and the ethical modes of life. The poet who is
content to remain in the aesthetic stage, relying on the uses of the
imagination, hovers, as it were, over seventy thousand fathoms of
water. He resorts to the deception of art in order to hide from himself
the fact that he has not "existed" at all. Again and again, Kierkegaard
points out that such creative aspirations are useless. Inwardness cannot
be directly communicated. It is what is essentially incommunicable
which must be suggested by an inner resonance of spirit. "Existence in
what has been understood," Kierkegaard declares, "cannot be directly
communicated to any existing spirit, not even by God, much less by a
human being." 8 But if that is the case, and it certainly voices Kierke-
gaard's most fundamental belief, then the burden of his writings is that
art must in the end consent to its own extinction. There is no escaping
the logic of that position, even if the Kierkegaardian mystic spurns the
conclusions of logic.
Not that Kierke~aard denies the importance of keeping the imagi-
nation and sensibility alive, but they can be kept alive only through the
agonizing struggle to achieve faith. The individual, in his desire to
become whole, must always be prepared to bear the full weight of
spiritual conflict. To be truly existing he must preserve "the poetic in
his life.... " 9 Thus Kierkegaard eloquently stresses the vital importance
of imaginative vision, the role of feeling, the dialectics of inwardness,
but these are all stages designed to reach the ultimate triumph of
spiritual commitment. Consequently the Existential poet does not
eliminate aesthetic passion, for it is in this manner that he retains his
hold on the concrete, yet basically he is not interested in poetry but in
"authentic" existence.
Kierkegaard's writings have exerted a deep influence not only on
8 Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postcript, p. 244.
9 Ibid., p. 311.
modern poetry but also on literary criticism, and that is indeed surpris-
ing. Though Kierkegaard recommends that in matters of faith one
must of necessity employ the method of indirect communication and in
his own work illustrated how the devices of analogy and irony, meta-
phor and ambiguity, paradox and parable, humor and pathos can be
employed with maximum effectiveness, the whole drift of his thinking
is directed toward the transcendence and annihilation of the aesthetic
stage. If the poet remains a dedicated poet, his sole concern is with the
perfection of his art and everything else is subordinated to that purpose.
What absorbs his energy and calls forth his sacrificial devotion is the
perfection of the work, not the perfection of the life; creative fulfill-
ment, not salvation. But the Kierkegaardian injunction is categorical
and absolute: the truly religious poet must, if he is concerned about his
eternal happiness, transform his existence and give up everything with-
out exception for its sake - and that means, of course, the glory of art.
The ethical decision cannot be made through the medium of poetry.
The different spheres of existence and expression must be kept distinct
and apart. Kierkegaard cogently emphasizes the primacy of the religious
consecration. In the following passage in Concluding Unscientific
Postscript he points out why the religious poet is caught in a peculiarly
embarrassing position:
Such a poet will seek to establish a relation to the religious through the imagination; but
for this very reason he succeeds only in establishing an aesthetic relation to something
aesthetic.... If the religious is in truth the religious, if it has submitted itself to the
discipline of the ethical and preserves it within itself, it cannot forget that religious
pathos does not consist in singing and hymning and composing verses ... so that the poetic
productivity, if it does not cease entirely, or if it flows as richly as before, comes to be
regarded by the individual himself as something accidental.... Aesthetically it is the poetic
productivity which is essential, and the poet's mode of existence is accidental. 1o
Once the poet rises to the height of the religious vision, once he
exists religiously, he either stops writing or he regards his productivity
as something accidental. Kierkegaard, himself a prolific writer, rejects
the creative life. He points out the confusion that is bound to arise when
a poet is for a variety of reasons drawn to the Church. Such a formal
gesture of affiliation does not prove that he is at all religious. The fact
that he is a poet counts for naught in the evolution of his religiosity. If
he possessed true existential pathos he would, in his bid for eternal
happiness, seek to transform everything in his existence, including the
aesthetic passion. Kierkegaard calls for the death of art.
10 Ibid., pp. 347-348.

That a poet, for instance, refuses to permit his own poetic production influence
his mode of existence is aesthetically quite in order, or altogether a matter of
indifference; ethically the poem is infinitely indifferent, but aesthetically it
is the poetic production and the possibility it expresses which embodies the
highest value. But ethically on the other hand, this question of the individual's
mode of existence is of infinite importance; ethically the poem is infinitely indifferent, but
the poet's mode of existence ought to mean infinitely more to him than anything else.
Aesthetically it would be the highest pathos for the poet to annihilate himself, for him to
demoralize himself if necessary, in order to produce masterpieces. Aesthetically it would
be in order for a man to sell his soul to the devil... but also to produce miracles of art.
Ethically it would perhaps be the highest pathos to renounce the glittering career without
saying a single word. l l
Kierkegaard is entirely consistent in upholding the religious position.

If the poet decides to live in eternity without ever abandoning existence
in time, then, once he makes the irrational leap of faith, he must forego
the pleasurable but empty distractions of the creative life. Once he
begins to exist religiously, art becomes for him a thing of utter in-
difference. Existential pathos cultimates in silence. The poet must live
religiously, not write religiously. Henceforth his point of ultimate
reference is God, not beauty. He is completely absorbed (and why
should he not be if he craves, and believes in the possibility of, eternal
happiness?) in the search for salvation, whereas aesthetically he is
committed to the pursuit of disinterestedness. The religious Exis-
tentialist must practice the difficult virtue of renunciation and re-
wnstruct his whole mode of existence so that he gives himself absolute·
ly to the absolute and relatively to the relative. The Existentialist
individual takes on of necessity the burden of suffering. As Kierke-
gaard declares: "Poesy is for the immediate consciousness the ex-
planation and glorification of life, but for the religious consciousness
it is a beautiful and amiable jest, whose consolation religiosity never-
theless spurns, because the religious comes to life precisely in suffer-
ing." 12 It is therefore not a question of including God within a poetic
discourse. That changes nothing. "No," says Kierkegaard, "an aesthetic
view of life, even if interlarded with both the names of God and Christ,
remains an aesthetic view of life.... " 13
And the distinction between the two stages still holds true even
when the poet, in his own life, strives earnestly to exemplify the
religious ideal. A poet may suffer in existence, but what does he do
with this suffering? He transmutes it into song. Instead of compre-
hending the source and meaning of his suffering, he flees from it by
11 Ibid., p. 349.
12 Ibid., p.390.
13 Ibid., p. 391n.
poetically envisaging a far happier state of affairs, a Golden Age, a

cosmic harmony. Though he is thus able, through the magic enchant-
ment of art, to explain the whole of existence, he cannot explain him-
self. What is of supreme importance is not the expression of art but the
reality of suffering. Either the poet is religious and gives up the specious
pleasures of art, humbling himself before the throne of God, or he
compromises his religiosity and keeps faith with the Muses. But if he
makes the decision to devote everything to God, then he makes no
effort, by verbalized incantation or poetic prayers, to express this feel-
ing. All attempts at utterance are a profanation. What we have sought
to show is that while the inwardness Kierkegaard recommends is
conducive to faith it militates against the affirmation of art, for this in-
wardness cannot be communicated. It is an inwardness which is secret,
ineffable, known only to God, alien and inimical to aesthetic expres-
sion.
2. THE A EST H E TIC S 0 F NIH I LIS M
In Germany in the latter part of the nineteenth century arose a

prophet who, by setting himself in opposition to Christ, militantly en-
gaged the Kierkegaardian ontology. In The Birth of Tragedy,
Nietzsche tried to rise above all temptations, especially the irrational
acceptance of the supernatural, by viewing life and the world as an
aesthetic spectacle that required no further justification. The abyss of
despair in which the individual was plunged in a universe void of
ultimate meaning - that could be overcome only by an aesthetic
resolution, not by falling back on revelation or faith. Nietzsche's
iconoclastic originality lay in his determination to forge ahead in his
metaphysical and creative quest without benefit of divine premises.
What he struggled to find out - and it is the mark of his extraordinary
courage as an Existential thinker - was whether values could be affirm-
ed without dependence on God.
If we contrast Kierkegaard's views on aesthetics with those that
Nietzsche voices in The Birth of Tragedy, we come to perceive what
issues are at stake. George Brandes had in 1888 tried to interest
Nietzsche in Kierkegaard by referring to him as "one of the profoundest
psychologists that have ever existed." 14 Nietzsche, writing from Nice,
proposed on his next visit to Germany to take up what he called "the
14 George Brandes, Friedrich Nietzsche. Translated by A. G. Chater. New York: The
Macmillan Company. 1915, p. 69.
psychological problem of Kierkegaard." 15 but it was too late for him to

read the work of this melancholy Dane. Though they were both Exis-
tentialist thinkers and had, each in his own way, sounded the depths of
spiritual despair, Nietzsche, had he studied the work of Kierkegaard,
would unquestionably have rejected the latter's desperate efforts to
reach the Absolute with one fatal leap. 16
Nietzsche sets out to define and identify the Dionysiac spirit on the
assumption that here is the key to the origin of tragedy among the
Greeks. Why did they turn to tragedy and grapple so resolutely with
all that was enigmatic and awe-inspiring in existence? Could their
tragic sense perhaps have grown out of their intoxication with life,
their plenitude of being, their sheer exuberance of health and vigor?
Nietzsche's contention is that "art, rather than ethics, constituted the
essential metaphysical activity of man," 17 a point of view which stands
diametrically opposed to the Kierkegaardian dismissal of the aesthetic
stage. For the German philosopher, all the processes of existence were
to be viewed through the life-enhancing perspective of aesthetics. In
fact, he looked upon God as the supreme artist, "amoral, recklessly
creating and destroying, realizing himself indifferently in whatever he
does or undoes, ridding himself by his acts of the embarrassment of
his riches and the strains of his internal contradictions." 18
All this sets Nietzsche defiantly apart from the Christian mythos,
which uses absolute standards, for the truth of God, as Nietzsche points
out, "relegates all art to the realm of falsehood and in so doing
condemns it." 19 Hence the inveterate antipathy of Christian eschat-
ology for the conception of art as salvation. As Kierkegaard insisted, all
art belongs to the realm of illusion, the finite, the historical; it is a
deception to be unmasked and then rigorously cast aside. Nietzsche
recognizes that Christianity is committed to a hatred of art, and he
denounces it as a cult that encourages a loathing of life, a fear of
beauty that is mediated through the senses, a yearning for extinction.
It represents "the most dangerous, the most sinister form the will to
destruction can take .... " 20 Against the sickly, ascetic lie of Christianity,
Nietzsche, the metaphysical rebel, raised the banner of art.
Thus Nietzsche's aesthetic philosophy, in its analysis of the nature
IS Ibid., p. 71.
16 Walter Kaufman, Nietzsche. New York: Meridian Books, 1956, p. 106.
17 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals. Trans-
lated by Francis Golffing. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1956, p. 9.
18 Ibid., p. 9.
19 Ibid., p. 10.
20 Ibid., p. 11.
of Dionysian and Apollonian art, is the dialectical opposite of Kierke-

gaard's mysticism. For Nietzsche salvation is to be won through the
medium of illusion. If the aesthetic outlook is courageously maintained,
then man himself can be regarded as a work of art in the making,
reaching out toward perfection. Nietzsche does not draw back from the
consequences that follow from his aesthetic contemplation of life.
"Only as an aesthetic product," he argues, "can the world be justified
to all eternity.... " 21 The creative affirmation implicit in art participates,
even if only partially, never completely, in the ecstasy of that act of
primal creation which God, the cosmic artist, experienced when he
made the world: what Coleridge, in defining the primary Imagination,
calls "a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the
infinite I AM."
Either / or: the Kierkegaardian dialectic of the infinite and the re-
nunciation which demands that everything beautiful be sacrificed for
the sake of God, or the Nietzschean exaltation of tragedy as embodied
in the aesthetic way of life. But why should a number of religious poets
and critics have seized on the Kierkegaardian vision of the divine for
their illumination of the creative process when art cannot promote the
way to salvation? The effort on the part of the poet to find inspiration
in the religious myth of the Absurd is self-contradictory and suicidaL
To begin with, he cannot believe in these religio-metaphysical myths.
The will to believe is not enough to sustain him. He cannot find the
basis for a new religious existence through poetic activity, only
through complete surrender to God, and that means the abdication of
art. Poetry, as Kierkegaard repeatedly emphasized, cannot serve as a
surrogate for religion. The poet needs faith, if he needs faith, in
order to work out his own destiny on earth, not in order to write more
satisfactory poetry.
And why this singular fixation on the goal of eternity? Because,
answers Harold H. Watts in Hound and Quarry, by cutting himself off
from eternity and living exclusively in time, the poet falls into despair,
since he cannot make meaning out of his life. He can discover no
principle of reconciliation between the human and the divine, no
solution for the existential predicament of man in the flux of time.
Watts protests against the prevalent tendency today to transform God
into a metaphor, a psychological concept. Because of the pernicious
influence of science, God no longer exists as a being outside the sphere
of time. God is now a generalization that represents the totality of
12 Ibid., p. 42.
matter in the universe or he is the expression of energy incarnate in the

evolutionary process.
Yet the Kierkegaardian aesthetic, if the poet adopts it as his creative
vade mecum, drives home the inescapable conclusion that poetry and
mysticism in its extreme form are incompatible. Poetry is not mysticism
but poetry. It is not an organon for the discovery of transcendental truths.
If poetry does deal with mysticism, as is true of a "religious" poet like
Blake, it does so by bringing it back into the realm of Nature. Blake
worshipped no anthropomorphic God; it is the image of Man he
exalts, it is the holiness of all life that kindles his vision. God, in
particular, stands for the sum of all human potentialities. The poet who,
like Blake, exalts man as God or rejects the dependence of man on
God, at least remains productive, even if his work is heretical.
Yeats, for example, though forever seeking to get in touch with the
supernatural, remained outside the Christian fold. He could not get
himself to believe in the doctrine of immortality. Unlike the Kierke-
gaardian poet who weds the bride of silence and dedicates himself
sacrificially to the contemplation of God, Yeats devoted himself to the
aesthetic life and chose as his aim the perfection of the work. But just
as the religious poet cannot altogether subdue the inner voices of doubt,
so the modern poet in a secular world cannot silence within him the
voices that demand some religious insight and assurance. Thus Yeats
waged a lifelong war between spirit and sense, the aesthetic and the
mystical, but he waged it in terms congenial to his art. Hence he could
not sink himself in the Absolute. Only through the medium of the
senses could the spiritual take on the light of life and meaning - a
point of view he had learned originally from his poetic master, William
Blake. The effectual answer to Kierkegaard's call for an inwardness
that abolishes the aspiration toward poetic production is given by
Yeats in his autobiography: "But what can the Christian confessor say
to those who more and more must make all out of the privacy of their
thought, calling up perpetual images of desire, for he cannot say 'Cease
to be artist, cease to be poet', where the whole life is art and poetry, nor
can he bid men leave the world .... " 22
In short, ascetic, otherworldly Christianity cannot satisfy the long-
ings and needs of the poet. Since the time of the Renaissance, in fact,
the Promethean affirmation of art has been condemned by the Church
as a form of diabolical infidelity. Why? Because art rather than God
22 The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats. New York: The Macmillan Company,
1936, p. 268.
was to become the highest end. According to Jaques Maritain in Art

and Scholasticism, "it is folly to seek in art the words of eternal life
and the repose of the human heart...." 23 Yet this is the species of folly,
if folly it be, that characterizes the striving of the modern poet for
whom the Christian myth has been stripped of its sacramental efficacy.
Divorced from the Church and highly critical of the Christian tradition,
in which he is nevertheless deeply steeped, he must of necessity depend
on art, and art alone, as his principle of "salvation." He cannot invoke
the old sacred names of "God" and "faith." Infidelity of this kind may
end in despair but it does not cultimate in silence. 24
To a man of the Middle Ages or the Puritans of the seventeenth
century Kierkegaard's vision of inwardness would have been damned
as a dangerous heresy. To affirm that truth is subjectivity and subjectivi-
ty is truth, to declare that each man must achieve faith alone and in his
own way seek to establish a relationship to God who remains unknow-
able - all that would have been condemned as the doctrine of the
Devil and their author burned at the stake. It is precisely in the
twentieth century, an age of uncurbed skepticism, when the myth of
God has collapsed, that interest in Kierkegaard's work has sprung up.
For he can be read with close sympathy and understanding by the
atheist and agnostic as well as the mystic, the Freudian poet as well
as the orthodox Protestant believer, the rebel as well as the religieux.
He reenacts for them the dialectic of the infinite where nothing is
settled and the dream of eternity and the miracle of the Incarnation
must be unfolded against the shifting backdrop of time. If modern
man feels that he hangs suspended over a void, that his activities are
meaningless in a world that is headed for destruction, if he seeks in
vain for a principle of tragic significance in a universe that is but energy
in motion, if he feels despair seize upon him as he profits from the dis-
coveries of science and the advance of technology but realizes that they
are of no help in lending order and purpose to human existence, if he
suffers from the absence of God and from a persistent but essentially
23 Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism. Translated by Joseph W. Evans. New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962, p. 36.
24 Heir of the Age of the Enlightenment, the modern poet often turns to the old
mythologies, pagan or Christian, as providing a fruitful philosophical perspective, but the
accent of faith is missing. The Devil of Doubt has driven the children of Adam out of
the Garden of Eden, where they could cherish the old instinctive and universal conscious-
ness of faith in the divine. In "Myth and Metaphysics," Kimon Friar declares: "Since
Goethe, the severance between the metaphysics and myth of Christianity has become so
great that artists have been unable to use its myth alone as an 'objective correlative' with
which to systematize the diversity of the modern world." Kimon Friar (ed.), Modern
Poetry. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951, pp. 424-425.
futile longing for God - then he can discover all this set forth with
remarkable prophetic insight and a wealth of brilliant paradoxes in the
writings of Kierkegaard. Here is a fellow sufferer, a companion in
adversity, a wanderer in darkness who keeps open the wound of the
negative, a singer of doubt, a dancer over the void, a pilgrim of the
Absolute.
Yet the poet cannot afford to follow his example and accept his
recommendations. As a man he may decide to make the leap perilous
and land on the other side of faith, but if he does so, if he enters the
religious stage, he must perforce renounce forever his interest in the
creative life. There is no further need to write. The more deeply he
plunges into inwardness, the more surely will he lose the desire to
make poems, and even if the old creative urgency should overcome
him his poetry will become increasingly abstract and obscure as he
endeavors to shadow forth the incomprehensible nature of God in his
eternity.
Hence the poet of the modern has no other recourse but to follow
the Nietzschean way (though he will modify it to suit his own taste and
temperament), even if it leads to the ultimate of nihilism. Though he
reaches the outposts of nothingness, he at least retains his creative free-
dom and tragic dignity. His pessimism as he gazes into the nothingness
that threatens to overwhelm him is a mark of his ontological courage,
his artistic integrity, his moral strength to bear the worst that life can
possibly inflict upon him. His nihilism springs from a vitality that feels
itself equal to wrestling with the chimeras and nightmares of existence,
a power that can face the terrors of the infinite. He has learned all this
from the father of modern nihilism - Nietzsche who, in his analysis of
the Dionysian-Apollonian spirit, shows how the lyrical poet, a Dionysiac
artist, achieves salvation through the magic of illusion. Like the satyr,
personification of Dionysiac man, who catches intimation of the terror
and truth of being, the poet moves in a dance of desire that "reaches
beyond the transcendental world, beyond the gods themselves, and
existence, together with its gulling reflection in the gods and an im-
mortal beyond, is deified. The truth once seen, man is aware of the
ghastly absurdity of existence...." 25 Here is the re-emergence of the
sense of the absurd which serves to unite the Kierkegaardian mystic
with "the rebel" who concentrates on the paradox of nothingness that
dwells in the heart of things and who voices in his work the spirit of
Promethean defiance.
25 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, p. 51.
Confronted with the choice between the myth of nothingness, the

sense of being spiritually lost, and the promise of a Christian salvation
in which he cannot get himself to believe, the contemporary poet can
move in either direction: he can make the Kierkegaardian leap, as
Auden has done, and embrace the faith or, as an outcast of Eden and
bereft of God, he can learn to live with the truth of his dereliction.
Accepting the Nietzschean aesthetic resolution, he is left with the pri-
vilege of affirming his tragic protest against existence, even though he
knows that this gesture, too, is absurd. But even as he struggles to
recapture the moral strength the Greeks possessed, the courage to look
horror in the face and say yes to life, even as he affirms the absurdity
of existence, he is haunted by the nostalgia for the infinite. An "out-
sider," he rejects God but in his outcast state, orphaned and inconsola-
ble, he yearns for the possibility of communion with the Ground of
Being, the existential dialogue between I and Thou which makes life,
and therefore art, meaningful. The problem facing the modern writer
is how to resolve this dilemma, how to achieve a synthesis, if that is at
all possible, how to reconcile art and life, the aesthetics of nihilism and
the dialectic of the infinite. It is Dostoevski who is a pioneer, clair-
voyant in his insights, in dealing with the problem of religion in
literature.
CHAPTER V
DOSTOEVSKI AND THE PROBLEM

OF RELIGION
"What can a man accomplish?" is the atheist's

characteristic query, and Dostoevsky exquisitely
realized the fact that to deny God is inevitably
to exalt man.
Andre Gide, Dostoevsky 1
Without question the three figures who were most instrumental in

shaping the modern spirit in all its contradictions and complexities were
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoevski. Of the three the one who was
most influential in demonstrating imaginatively in terms of fiction the
dualism, that is marked by ambiguous interaction, of God and Devil,
the divine and the demonic, good and evil, faith and atheism, is Dos-
toevski. It is ironic and yet entirely fitting that a devout believer among
the novelists of the preceding century should have intensified the
dialectic of doubt, the play of opposites, the drama of negation, and yet
it was this upholder of Russian orthodoxy, this impassioned mystic,
who pointed out the way.
Dostoevski, like Kierkegaard, raises many of the questions that per-
plex the creative minds of the twentieth century. Why is it that in the
history of fiction in the West there is really no example of a great
religious novel? The answer is clear enough: the genre does not exist.
There are no religious novels per se. The imaginative writer of fiction
feels an inescapable obligation to report and interpret the totality of
human experience, life in all its infinite vicissitudes and variety.
Religion is certainly a noble and vital part of life, but it is only a part.
The novelist who sets out, with whatever righteous motives, to make
it appear the whole of life is distorting, if not falsifying, his creative
material, his penetration of reality. From his angle of vision, God is the
solution to all finite problems, the perspective of faith in the Ground
of Being renders meaningful all the relativities of experience, evil and
suffering and injustice, the dialectic of the infinite transcends all the
categories of the human, but the art of fiction perversely resists his
efforts to communicate the fullness of this vision. Whether he knows
it or not, in his efforts to edify and convert, he is betraying his mission
1 Andre Gide, DostoeZ'Sky. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1926. p. 156.
as an artist. In concentrating on what he conceives to be the all-im-

portant, liberating message of redemption, he allows the living reality
and complex truth of the art of fiction to elude him.
That is why novels written with too insistent a religious purpose in
mind generally fail to achieve their purpose. Did Tolstoy, after his con-
version, produce a great work of fiction that could be compared with
War and Peace or Anna Karenina? Or, to take a more recent example,
did Aldous Huxley's contribution as a novelist gain in depth and
power after he became a disciple of the perennial philosophy? Are
After Many a Summer and Time Must Have a Stop of greater intrinsic
value because of the mystical vision they contain than Point Counter
Point or Antic Hay? On the contrary, his novels become more diffuse,
abstract, hortatory, evangelical in tone. Like Tolstoy, he turned preacher
and ceased to be in artistic command of his material.
Art, in short, abhors dogma. The artist who is preoccupied with
doctrine, religious or political or moral, suffers a serious, if not fatal,
decline in sensibility. His imagination is curbed by the imperative need
to believe, the need to proclaim, in all its doctrinal purity, the gospel
that saves. Like Tolstoy in the later stages of his spiritual development,
he is so much concerned with the task of turning mankind aside from
the paths of evil that he becomes impatient with the technical and
structural requirements of his art. The imagination is progressively
held in check by the operation of the theologizing or moralizing intel-
lect. Instinct, passion, feeling (except that which relates to religious
belief), the power of sensuous observation, uncensored insight into the
complexities of the human soul, these elements are gradually eliminated
by the imagination as it hardens in the procrustean frame of dogmatic
faith. Kierkegaard is perfectly right: what is of supreme importance
for the religious seeker is not the expression of art but the reality of the
quest for God. Either the writer is completely religious and abandons
the pleasures of immediacy, humbling himself before the throne of
God, or he compromises his religiosity and surrenders to the enchant-
ment of art. But if, as we pointed out in preceding chapter, he decides
to devote everything to God, then all attempts at creative utterance
cease and he falls into silence.
Yet t..here are novels that are profoundly religiOUS in content without
ceasing to be novels, and it is these that merit profound critical con-
sideration. How are they constructed? What is the secret of their
enduring appeal? How account for the dramatic intensity and universal-
ity of insight of such Catholic writers as Franc;ois Mauriac and Graham
DOS TOE V SKI AND THE PRO B L E M OF R ELI G ION 73
Greene? In their works, religion is presented as experience, as spiritual

conflict, as vision and aspiration, struggle and search and suffering,
not as codified theology. What we get is a convincing and com-
prehensive picture of life in all its irreducible mysteriousness; we be-
hold hO\y the force of earthy instinct is locked in battle with the
longings of the spirit to reach the absolute; we witness the never-
ending conflict, unsparingly portrayed, between the divine and the
diabolical, good and evil, the rebellious upsurge of doubt and the
countervailing affirmation of faith. In brief, the novelist attempts to
delineate all the irrational and refractory elements of human existence.
If he is devoutly religious, his convictions will undoubtedly influence
his depiction of characters, his interpretation of the seamless web of
experience, but even in doing so his fidelity to the imaginative truth
will not desert him, for if he remains aware of man's consuming need
for God he is also steadily a\vare of the mischief that is wrought by the
Devil who walks the earth in multifarious disguises, the pervasiveness
of evil as well as the hunger after righteousness. And the same principle
applies, mutatis mutandis, to a nihilistic novelist like Samuel Bekcett
whose characters engage desperately in the search for meaning in a
darkness that never lifts.
Thus, as he probes into the mind and heart of his dramatis personae,
as he focuses his gaze on the storm-swept arena of life, the religious
novelist must of necessity reveal not only the fervors of faith but also
the agonies of doubt. In order to do justice to his theme, he must dwell
on the compulsions of the unconscious, the potency of dreams, the
mighty temptations of the flesh, the stubborn, disconcerting questions
raised by the logical intellect, the seductiveness of sin. Even his saints
are therefore not altogether free from those insidious traps set and
baited by the Devil, the fiendish blasphemies which spring up in the
mind, who knows how or why, to defile the sanctity of faith. Hence
in those novels which deal effectively with the religious theme in all
its paradoxical aspects, the writer strives to achieve a synthesis of affirm-
ation and negation, light and darkness, faith and doubt, spirit and
flesh, good and evil, God and Nothingness. In one of his letters Dos-
toevski declares unequivocally: "If anyone could prove tome that Christ
is outside the truth, and if the truth really did exclude Christ, I should
prefer to stay with Christ and not with truth." 2 In his fiction, how-
ever, he holds the balance even, picturing the overpowering beauty and
2 Fyodor Dostoevski, Letten of Fyodor Mikhail Dostoet/sky to his Family and Friends.
Translated by Ethel Colburn Mayne. New York: Macmillan Co .• n. d., p. 71.
perfection of the Savior but also including the irresistible thrust of the
truth which excludes Christ, so that his saints and sinners, his ascetics
and lechers, his mystics and sybarites, seem to have much in common. In
Crime and Punishment, a harlot like Sonya, intensely religious in
spirit, proves to be the means of converting a nihilist like Raskolnikov
to a contrite belief in Christ.
There can be no question about it: Dostoevski is the religious novel-
ist par excellence. The lapse of time has not diminished the intrinsic
greatness of his work. He is concerned with life in all its variousness
and baffling complexity: the psychology of "double thoughts," the sur-
prising life of dreams, the seizures of the unconscious, the hidden,
treacherous depths and twists of the human personality. In such novels
as The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, The Possessed, and The Brothers
Karamazov, Dostoevski paints with extraordinary insight the inner
battle that is waged by those who embrace or reject the religious out-
look. For all their spirituality, Alyosha and Father Zossima in The
Brothers Karamazov have heard the voice of the Devil, but these
saintlike characters are actually subordinated in importance to a satani-
cally obsessed nihilist like Ivan. If Dmitri ecstatically believes in God
despite his addiction to drink and his enslavement by passion, he lacks
the brooding hostility toward God of a character like Ivan and his dis-
ciple, Smerdyakov. Similarly, in The Possessed, Shatov, the believer,
gains our affection and respect for his essential goodness of heart, but
he is thrown in the shade by a tormented diabolist like Stavrogin, and
even Shatov, though he struggles hard to overcome his doubts, cannot
achieve immediacy and completeness of faith.
The Idiot, a study of the strange aberrations of love, illustrates
Dostoevski's favorite narrative techniques and some of his recurrent
dialectical patterns of counterpointed tension. Here we are introduced
to Prince Myshkin, a hero who is an epileptic, a noble character endow-
ed with childlike innocence and a Christlike capacity for self-sacrificing
love and forgiveness. When Myshkin visits Rogozhin's gloomy house
and sees Holbein's picture of Christ who has been removed from the
cross, Rogozhin suddenly asks him if he believes in God. It is at this
point in the story that the religious motif enters in challengingly. For
Rogozhin loves to stare at the Holbein painting, the one which, as
Myshkin declares, might make some people lose their faith, and that
is precisely the effect it has on Rogozhin. Myshkin relates stories which
describe dramatically the contradictions that faith can generate, parti-
cularly the case of a peasant who believes so throughly in God that he
DOSTOEVSKI AND THE PROBLEM OF RELIGION 75
prays as he commits a murder. Myshkin declares that the essence of

religious feeling does not come under any sort of reasoning.
To be sure, The Idiot is not a religious but a psychological novel
that explores the destructive passion of love, yet this work is indis-
pensable for a knowledge of Dostoeski the novelist, his uncanny insight
into the operations of the unconscious and the irrationality of love,
particularly his brilliant, pre-Freudian defence of the value of the
creative visions born of disease. For example, Dostoevski furnishes a
vivid, meticulously detailed description of an attack of epilepsy: a
minute before the seizure actually comes Myshkin's brain is illuminated
and all his vital forces are wrought up to their highest pitch, and then
comes the culmination, the second of supernal vision and numinous
revelation of the highest form of existence. Myshkin recognizes that
these are but the manifestations of disease, but what does this matter if
his condition lifts him to a height of abnormal intensity, if he beholds
a vision of cosmic harmony and en joys an ineffable experience of time-
lessness.
Myshkin had resolved to begin a new life on returning to his native
land. Compassion constitutes the heart of his religious belief. "Compas-
sion was perhaps the chief and perhaps only law of all human ex-
istence." 3 That is the theme central to Dostoevski's religious faith. Like
Myshkin, he felt a vast compassion for all those souls who wander lost
in darkness. The favorite Dostoevskian themes are embodied in this
novel: the motivation for suicide, the corrupting power of money and
materialism, the struggle to achieve faith in the face of atheistic science.
Later on in the novel, Ippolit, a minor character suffering from
consumption who has decided to take his own life, insists on reading
his confession in public. In it he refers also to the Holbein painting
that depicts unforgettably the infinite agony the Savior had endured
before the crucifixion. Here is the face of a man only just removed
from the cross, still bearing some signs of life. But if this is the body
and the face the disciples beheld when Christ was taken from the cross,
how could they believe he would rise again? And why should Ippolit
not commit suicide? Since he knows the sentence of doom that has been
pronounced upon him, what religious obligations could possibly hold
him back? His consciousness had been kindled by a higher Power and
now it was condemned by the same Power to extinction. Why should
he kneel humbly in prayer and praise the Force that is about to hurl
3 Fyodor Dostoevski, The Idiot. Translated by Constance Garnett. New York: The
~facmillan Company, 1913, p. 229.
him into the void? How can he believe that there is a Presence up
above who will feel aggrieved by his refusal to go on living? His worth-
less life is probably needed as a sacrifice to complete the harmony,
though he has no comprehension of how the forces that make up this
harmony are arranged. Here is a minor character who wrestles in fear
and trembling with the problem of religion. For despite everything, he
cannot conceive that there is "no future life, no Providence," 4 even
though he cannot grasp the incomprehensible. But why, he cries out,
this perverse insistence on faith that is submissive, on belief that is
separated from reason, on piety that is shot through with humility?
Why ascribe our finite, human ideas to God? But if it is impossible for
man to understand the ways of God, then why must Ippolit be required
to answer for what is beyond all understanding?
Myshkin is the impassioned mouthpiece of Dostoevski's Slavophil
views, vehemently denouncing Roman Catholicism as un-Christian and
irreligious, as worse than atheism. Heatedly Myshkin argues: "Atheism
only preaches a negation, but Catholicism goes further: it preaches a
distorted Christ, a Christ calumniated and defamed by themselves, the
opposite of Christ! It preaches the Antichrist.... "5 Having taken over
worldly power, Catholicism in its political absolutism represents the
continuation of the Western Roman Empire. It is willing to sacrifice
the precious gift of faith for the sake of wielding secular power.
Atheism arose as a recoil from this lying, irreligious cult, the deadly
spiritual impotence of this worldly Church. Myshkin insists that this
is not a theological question. Socialism springs from Catholicism, from
the moral despair of people hungry for the bread and wine of faith. It
is the Russian Christ who must save the world. Russian intensity -
that is what is needed, for the Russian soul inevitably rushes to
extremes. If a Russian becomes an atheist, "he's sure to clamour for the
extirpation of belief in God by force, that is, by the sword." 6 All these
discussions of atheism and the Russian Christ are not introduced
gratuitously; they are an integral part of the dramatic action in the
novel.
Not that Dostoevski is a consummate craftsman in fiction; he is at
times capable of composing scenes that border on the melodramatic.
In this connection, one recalls the scene in Crime and Punishment in
which Raskolnikov kneels before Sonya the prostitute or, a more
4 Ibid .. p. 416.
5 I bid., p. 546.
6 I bid., p. 548.
flagrant case, the scene in which the suitor of Dounia attempts to

revenge himself upon Raskolnikov by planting a one-hundred rouble
bill on Sonya and accusing her of the theft. Despite these lapses in taste,
Crime and Punishment remains continuously absorbing, particularly in
its masterly delineation of Raskolnikov's state of mind before and after
the murder. The reader watches the fierce struggle that goes on within
him between intellect and conscience, Nietzschean pride and Christian
ethics. Raskolnikov, after committing the murder, crosses over the bor-
der line that separates the normal from the abnormal; he dwells in a
private universe of fantasy and dreams, brooding everlastingly on his
idee fixe, setting himself apart from and above the ruck of mankind,
rejecting all moral obligations, following to the limit the philosophy of
the superman. He does not draw back from the terrible consequences
of his philosophy, yet he cannot conquer his haunting, inexplicable
sense of guilt. Within him, as he seeks to justify his crime, rages the
battle between head and heart, conscience and reason, logic and morali-
ty, God and the negation of God.
The novel takes a new turn with the entrance of Svidrigailov on the
scene. Here is a depraved character, beyond good and evil, who
loves to engage in metaphysical discussions about God, ghosts,
immortality, the uncanny power displayed by the sick organism for
catching glimpses of another world. Svidrigailov is obsessed with the
theme of a future life. Why must eternity be represented as beyond
human conception? Why can it not be a small, confined place, "black
and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that's all eternity is?"7 That is
how he pictures it at times. That is how he would have shaped it. Eternity
reflects the mind of the observer.
In the meantime, Raskolnikov leads a nightmarishly tormented
existence, under a nervous compulsion to confess, but his "idea" holds
him back. He labors under the curse imposed on those who have been
cast out of God's mercy. He does not believe - that is the fearful
burden of punishment he must bear. But after torturing Sonya with his
doubts, he suddenly bends down before her and kisses her foot. He does
not bow down to her but to all the suffering of humanity. Unlike the
modern naturalistic novelist who tries to remain invisible behind the
scenes, Dostoevski does not hesitate to comment on the course of
action, and his illuminating remarks make us understand the nature of
the malady from which Raskolnikov is suffering, his overweening re-
7 Fyodor Dostoevski, Crime and Punishment. Translated by Constance Garnett Cleo
veland and New York: The World Publishing Co., 1947, p. 269.
liance on reason, his love of the abstract, the sheer cruelty of his intel-
lectual approach to life. Compared to Sonya, who is all feeling, all
sensibility, all compassion, he appears in a poor light indeed. And it is
Sonya who saves him from the abyss. It is Sonya who, by setting him
an example of selfless devotion to others, brings him back to hu-
manity.
In his talk with Sonya, Raskolnikov, curious about her spiritual
resources, asks her what God does for her. It is then, overcome with
emotion, she turns on him. He does not deserve an answer; never-
theless, she tells him that God does everything. Here is the clue that
explains the mystery of her life: how she could be steeped in vice and
not be corrupted by it. Faith - that is her way out. Despite his disbelief
in God, he begs her to read from the New Testament. As he makes the
request, he asks himself if he is not going mad. This religious mania,
he tells himself, is catching. He is a victim of impulses that run counter
to his Nietzschean philosophy of freedom.
Yet he cannot hold back his desire to confess to Sonya, for he needs
her forgiveness. In killing the old woman, the money-lender, what had
he done but simply rid the world of a useless creature, a louse. He had
displayed the daring of those supermen who took what they wanted
from life and overrode all scruples of conscience. It is then Sonya con-
demns him: "You turned away from God and God has smitten you,
has given you over to the devil." 8 She is aghast at this confession of a
crime that was committed gratuitously. Who has the right to kill? In
his agony Raskolnikov cries out that he did not murder the old woman:
he killed himself. Sonya bids him go and stand at the cross-roads and
bow down and kiss the earth and proclaim his crime, then God would
restore him to life.
He does so, he turns himself over to the police, but his penance
is not yet complete; his heart must be cleansed. What troubles his
conscience as he serves his sentence in Siberia is not a sense of guilt
but the fact that he had come to grief through a blunder. He still saw
nothing to live for. Wherein was he wrong in his reasoning? Those
who succeed in their bold undertaking are honored and called right.
There was the source of his criminality: he had failed and he had
confessed. At last he comes to perceive that the intellect had led to his
ruin. And it is love, Sonya's love, that is the means of his regeneration,
his resurrection from the death of his spirit. "Life had stepped into the
8 Ibid., p. 380.
place of theory and something quite different would work itself out in
his mind." 9
Though The Possessed is, strictly speaking, a "political" novel, it
contains a great deal of material that has a close bearing on the re-
ligious problem. For example, we meet Kirillov, the personification of
the myth of the absurd, the apostle of the salvationary philosophy of
suicide, who is searching for the reasons why men are afraid to kill
themselves. We shall encounter him again in the next chapter when
we take up the literature of suicide. Kirillov is bent on unmasking the
cunning deceptions of nature which make people love life. Once man
grows indifferent whether he lives or not, he will himself become a
god and God will be dethroned. In short, God does not exist, but, as
Kirillov cryptically adds, '"He is." 10 For him God is "the pain of the
fear of death," 11 but once this pain and terror is conquered man will
rise to the status of godhood. The annihilation of God will usher in a
new era of history: the apotheosis of the man-god. The man who dares
to kill himself and thereby asserts his will to freedom is God. Like
Dostoevski a monomaniac on the subject of faith, he confesses: "God
has tormented me all my life." 12
The story of The Possessed highlights the wretchedness and folly of
the human situation, the masks that people wear, their vanity and
obsessions, but it also throws into relief the religious passion of these
Russian characters, their high-strung idealism, their fanaticism.lt sounds
one of Dostoevski's favorite themes, namely, that the Russian masses,
chosen of God, will redeem the world. Shatov recalls the gospel
Stavrogin had once preached, that the Russian people were the one
"god-bearing" people on earth, "destined to regenerate and save the
world in the name of a new God." 13 Stavrogin had even declared that
"a man who was not orthodox could not be a Russian." 14 Furthermore,
he had told Shatov that "if it were mathematically proved to you that
the truth excludes Christ, you'd prefer to stick to Christ rather than
the truth" 1i) - a statement which is strikingly similar to the remark in
one of Dostoevskis letter that we have already quoted. Stavrogin had
9 Ibid., p. 498.
10Fyodor Dostoevski, The Possessed. Translated by Constance Garnett. New York: The
Macmillan Company, 1916, p. 105.
11 Ibid., p. 105.
12 Ibid., p. 105.
13 Ibid., p. 230.
14 Ibid., p. 231.
15 Ibid., p. 232.
formerly preached with passion the doctrine that no nation was ever
founded on science or reason.
The object of every national movement, in every people and at every period of its
existence is only the seeking for its god, who must be its own god, and the faith in Him
as the only true one. God is the synthetic personality of the whole people, taken from
its beginning to its end. 16
This is the faith that has sustained and inspired all nations which
have left their impress on the pages of history. A great people thus
takes on a messianic role of leadership. This is the Slavophilic mysticism
that Shatov had rapturously imbibed from the lips of Stavrogin. He
wonders if Stravrogin is an atheist now. Perhaps he was one then.
Shatov recalls the curious expression Stavrogin had once used: "To
cook your hare you must first catch it, to believe in God you must first
have a god." 17 There is the obsession that believers and nihilists alike
suffer from in this fascinatingly complex novel, so that religion and
revolution, faith in God and militant atheism, are shown to be closely
interrelated. To destroy without conscience, to kill without remorse,
one must first shatter all faith in God. When Stavrogin, whose personal
tragedy is that he cannot believe or disbelieve, presses home his ques-
tion and asks Shatov if he has caught his hare, the latter begins to
tremble with anger. '] only wanted to know," says Stavrogin, "do you
believe in God, yourself?" 18 Shatov's feverish reply betrays the des-
perateness of his religious quest. "I believe in Russia.... I believe in her
orthodoxy.... I believe in the body of Christ.... I believe that the new
advent will take place in Russia.... I believe.... " 19 But Stavrogin refuses
to be put off with equivocal answers. Does Shatov believe in God? It is
then that Shatov defiantly declares: "1... will believe in God." 20
The Possessed sharply defines for us a number of individualized
characters, especially the nihilists of the period who are dedicated to the
total overthrow of morality and religion. If there is no God, then there
are no compelling moral obligations and the end justifies the means.
Dostoevski brilliantly shows how the denial of God by the Russian
revolutionists of the nineteenth century leads them inevitably into
crime, so that The Possessed is actually a religious as well as a political
novel. What Dostoevski is principally interested in demonstrating is
that the breakdown of Stavrogin which drives him to suicide is due to
16 Ibid., p. 233.
17 Ibid., p. 235.
18 Ibid., p. 235.
19 Ibid., p. 235.
20 Ibid., p. 235.
DOSTOEV SKI AND THE PROBLE M 0 F RE LIGION 81
the lack of meaning and purpose in his life, his inability either to
believe or utterly disbelieve. As Kirillov puts it: "if Stavrogin has faith,
he does not believe that he has faith. If he hasn't faith, he does not
believe that he hasn't." 21
Kirillov is at least more consistent, more truly ·'possessed." He had
found his faith, which rests on a simple argument: 'If there is no God,
then I am God." 22 A religious mystic, he regards Christ as the Man
who was the loftiest of all those who walked the earth, but if Nature
did not spare Him then all existence is a foul lie and there is nothing
to live for. Kirillov will open the gates of salvation for all mankind.
He is resolved to kill himself and thus abolish that fear of death which
has been from the beginning of time the curse of man .. "1 can't under-
stand," he says, ·'how an atheist could know that there is no God and
not kill himself on the spot. To recognize that there is no God and not
to recognize at the same instant that one is God oneself is an absurdity,
else one would certainly kill oneself." 23 That is the secret of his
··religious" obsession, the madness of his inverted belief. The way in
which the plot of The Possessed is finally unraveled is relatively un-
important compared to the mighty scenes in which Dostoevski portrays
the struggle his revolutionary conspirators wage against God. In this
work he analyzes with splendid strokes of insight the excruciating di-
lemma of characters who must face life in a universe that they believe
(and how can they believe their negation?) is emptied of God.
In Dostoevski's fiction the religious struggle is fused organically
with the substance and structure of the story. Dostoevski is not only a
seer, an inspired mystic, but an artist. Whatever visions or ideas he was
haunted by he embodied in the work of fiction by "distancing" them,
by weaving them into the dynamic complex of the plot, by projecting
them as the passionate beliefs of the characters in the novel. Presented
as action in terms of dramatic conflict, the religious experience emerges
in all its complexity. If Dostoevski is religious in his intuitions, it still
remains true that no other writer of fiction, not even the most militant
naturalists of the twentieth century, men like Gorky and Artzybashef,
have given such a moving and imaginatively convincing portrayal of
the drama of doubt, the torments of the umbeliever, the tragedy that
overtakes the nihilist. This is particularly true of Dostoevski's greatest
work, The Brothers Karamazov.
21 Ibid., p. 579.
22 Ibid., p. 580.
23 Ibid., p. 582.
The father, Fyodor Karamazov, a dissolute, sensual buffoon, permits

his youngeest son Alyosha to join the monastery, but he insolently
proceeds to point out the contradictions inherent in the religious
outlook. How, he asks, could there be hooks in hell, the place to which
he is sure he will be consigned when he dies? And if there are no hooks
in hell, since there is no ceiling to which they can be attached, and he
will not be dragged down to this region of damnation, then there is no
justice in the world. But Alyosha, who is no sickly, otherworldly mystic,
knows that the desire to believe disposes one to believe. He was a
seeker after the truth and in order to achieve his goal he is willing to
undergo the most strenuous discipline. "As soon as he reflected serious-
ly he was convinced of the existence of God and immortality, and at
once he instinctively said to himself: 'I want to live for immortality,
and I will accept no compromise.' In the same way, if he had decided
that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once have become
an atheist and a socialist." 24
In describing "the miracles" that Father Zossima performs for the
sick and the afflicted, Dostoevski is well aware of "the natural," psycho-
logical explanations that can be given; and he does not deny that
possibly it is so. It is the belief in the efficacy of the sacrament that
makes the miracle come to pass, and Father Zossima depends on the
power of faith. God, he preaches, is infinite love and there is no sin
that He is not ready to forgive. When he is asked how one is to prove
faith, he replies that there is no way or proving it, though one can be
convinced. How? By the experience of active love, a love that calls
for fortitude, discipline, and sacrifice.
Ivan is the dialectician who represents the diabolical spirit of ne-
gation. He is of the opinion that the belief in immortality underlies and
conditions Christian love. Were that faith destroyed, nothing would
henceforth be immoraL Once faith in God and immortality is ended,
then egoism, even crime, becomes rational and honorable, indeed
inevitable. If there is no immortality, then man is under no compulsion
to lead a life of virtue and abnegation. As Alyosha intuitively realizes,
Ivan is tormented by a terrible doubt. He can find no answer to the
religious questions that plague him.
It is clear that for Dostoevski, the artist as well as the man, there
is only one question of supreme importance: is there a God? If so, is
there a life after death? He is not concerned with overt preachment or
24 Fyodor Dostoevski, The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Constance Garnett.
New York: The Modern Library, n. d., p. 28.
DOS TOE V SKI AND THE PRO B L E M OF R ELI G ION 83
the niceties of theological doctrine. In The Brothers Karamazov the

religious issue is projected with poignant psychological insight in terms
of the struggle that goes on within the mind and heart of the major
characters. Dmitri, unlike I van, is no logician; a Karamazov at heart,
he plunges headlong into ruin, but in the very depths of degradation he
raises a hymn of praise to God. "Though I may be following the devil,
I am Thy son, 0 Lord, and I love Thee.... " 25 What he cannot either
understand or endure is the contradiction "that a man of lofty mind
and heart begins with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal
of Sodom. What's still more awful is that a man with the ideal of
Sodom in his soul does not renounce the ideal of the Madonna.... " 26
Within the soul of man God and the Devil are locked in combat.
Dostoevski's sinners are not irremediably wicked. The most infamous
libertine is smitten with the desire for purity, the ideal of the Madonna,
the craving for goodness, even as he knows that in the end he will
succumb to the wily temptations of the Devil. Nevertheless, he ex-
periences the yearning, religious in essence, to reach out toward a better
life, to come closer to God. No one, not even Father Zossima or
Alyosha, is exempt from this struggle between saintliness and sensual-
ity, purity and passion, self-indulgence and renunciation. It is the
uncompromising honesty of Dostoevski's portrayal of character, the
imaginative depth and force of his creative vision, his awareness of the
power of evil and all the cogent arguments that reason can muster
against the affirmation of faith in God - it is all this that makes The
Brothers Karamazov such a profoundly "religious" novel.
In one scene, the father asks Ivan point blank if there is a God or
not. Ivan replies there is no God whereas Alyosha quietly insists there
is. The following passage furnishes a fine example of Dostoevski's
dramatically effective method of handling the enormously difficult
problem of religious faith.
"Ivan, and is there immortality of some sort, just a little, just a tiny bit?"
"There is no immortality either."
"None at all?"
"None at all."
"There's absolute nothingness then. Perhaps there is just something? Anything is better
than nothing."
"Absolute nothingness."
"Alyosha, is there immortality?"
"There is."
"God and immortality?"
25 Ibid., p. 129.
26 Ibid., p. 130.
"God and immortality."

"H'm! It's more likely that Ivan's right. Good Lord! to think what faith, what force of
all kinds, man has lavished for nothing, on that dream, and for how many thousand
years. Who is laughing at man? Ivan: For the last time, once for all, is there a God or
not? I ask for the last time!"
"And for the last time there is not."
"Who is laughing at mankind, Ivan?"
"It might be the devii," said Ivan, smiiing.
"And the devil? Does he exist?"
.'No, there's no devil either."
"It's a pity. Damn it all, what wouldn't I do to the man who first invented God!
Hanging on a bitter aspen tree would be too good for him!"
"There would have been no civilisation if they hacin', invenced God." C7
Here is a scene of action in the form of dialogue, a metaphysical
catechism in which denial is stronger than affirmation, that fits in
admirably with the kind of insight into each of the principal characters
that will later explain the tragedy that befalls the Karamazov family.
Dostoevski makes it clear that there is nothing surprising in the fact
that this wretched reprobate, the father, dwells so persistently on the
question of the existence of God. He, too, has his lonely moments
of terror, his nightmarish fear of death. Though Dmitri attacks him
physically, he confesses, and not without good reason, that he is more
afraid of Ivan. At one point in the story, Alyosha declares that he is at
heart a Karamazov, "and perhaps I don't even believe in God." 28
It is Ivan, however, who is obsessed with the question whether life
is worth living if there is no God and no immortality. Yet the biologi-
cal instinct, the will to live at all costs, is stronger than any principle of
metaphysical negation, and it is this passionate attachment to life,
regardless of everything, that is definitely a family characteristic of the
Karamazovs. Ivan's confession reveals the contradictions which torment
him; his mind clings stubbornly to life and yet craves the support of
reason for its upsurge of animal faith. One problem absorbs him to the
exclusion of everything else: the eternal question of immortality. Ivan
has long since made up his mind not to brood on these metaphysical
enigmas. He has decided to accept God but he cannot reconcile himself
to the world God created. With his finite mind he can comprehend
neither God nor his creation, but it is God's world, with its cruel im-
position of suffering on the innocent, that he refuses in the last analysis
to accept, even though he is fully aware that the world rests on ab-
surdities.
He demands that justice should reign on earth, that the works of
27 Ibid., pp. 163-164.

28 Ibid., p. 270.
DOS TOE V SKI AND THE PRO B L E M 0 F R ELI G ION 85
God should conform to some intelligible principle of justification. The

Promethean rebel turned nihilist, he cannot, like Stavrogin in this res-
pect, either believe or disbelieve. The parable of the Grand Inquisitor,
which Ivan once composed, reveals the satanic deviousness of his mind.
The Grand Inquisitor insists on deceiving people with the myth of
faith, holding up before them the mystery of God and the promise of
immortality, though he knows they will find nothing beyond the grave
but darkness and death. The secret of the Grand Inquisitor is simply
that he does not believe in God. But how, Alyosha asks, can Ivan go on
living if he believes such dreadful things? With a cold smile Ivan
replies: "There is a strength to endure everything." 29 Even though he
entertains such beliefs he can escape corruption by the Karamazov
way, by the insight that if God is dead then everything is lawful.
It is the spiritual struggle of Ivan that constitutes the heart of the
novel. Having cast off God, he begins to behold hallucinatory visions
of the Devil. He cannot withstand the assaults of conscience. Was he
guilty of instigating the murder with which Dmitri is falsely charged?
Smerdyakov, who has become his disciple, reminds him of the doctrine
Ivan had once preached, namely, that if there is no God there is no
such thing as virtue. In his lonely bouts with the Devil, Ivan's alter ego
mocks all the philosophical arguments he had once propounded. Even
if there were a Devil, and that could be demonstrated, that would still
not prove the existence of God. And the Devil, when Ivan violently
asks him whether there is a God, replies that he does not know.
Therein lies the secret of Dostoevski's greatness as a novelist: the
artistic skill and unflinching integrity with which he presents mutually
antagonistic forces of character - humility and pride, hatred and love,
negation and affirmation, logic and intuition, faith and blasphemy.
His narrative method derives from his belief that reason is not the aim
and end of life, the clue to the meaning of the universe. It is the
intellect, a limited and decidedly inferior instrument, that is the enemy
of God. Christian in his inspiration and outlook, Dostoevski affirms the
gospel of Christ but refuses to accept the mediation of the Church.
Far from orthodox in his conception of faith, he is deeply preoccupied
in his writing with the problem of evil, not as an abstract but intimately
personal or, as Kierkegaard would have phrased it, existential issue. He
knows that the Devil has his dwelling-place in the high places of the
intellect and sits in baleful majesty on the throne of reason. The Devil
tempts man with all the casuistical resources of logic. But if one denies
29 Ibid., p. 322.
God, then man is supreme and stands alone, and how, Dostoevski
inquires, can one believe in man? In the figures of Kirillov, Ivan, and
Stavrogin, Dostoevski shadowed forth the destructive myth of nothing-
ness that is the only alternative left to godless man. Despite the basic
religious convictions he holds, Dostoevski handles the religious pro-
blem without ever succumbing to the vice of dogmatism. His novels,
rooted in actuality, are instinct with the charged dynamism of the
particular, and it is this fidelity to the sensory quality of experience in
all its diversity and uniqueness that lends powerful dramatic tension to
his work.
His most effective fictional device is to suggest the ambiguity of the
world in both its real and symbolic dimensions, so that no single inter-
pretation of human motives will suffice. This ambiguity is powerfully
brought out whenever Dostoevski comes to deal with the emergence of
the supernatural. Both possibilities, affirmation and negation, exist. In
brief, Dostoevski's imagination presents alternative explanations so
that, as in the overpowering scene between Ivan and the Devil, there
can be no doubt that Ivan, like Stephen Dedalus in the Nighttown
scene in Ulysses, is suffering from hallucinations, yet the Devil is given
a realistic embodiment, even if he is only a figment of a disordered
mind. Even so, the final impression produced is one of dramatically
controlled ambiguity.
Such multiple exposures heighten the singular effect of paradox and
irony; the element of skepticism that creeps in whenever "miracles" are
to be revealed transforms the religious experience into one in which the
conflict of belief and disbelief is held in balance, unresolved. Dostoev-
ski disappoints the believer but merely as if to confirm the point that
belief is infinitely more difficult but not for that reason to be discarded.
As Renato Poggioli points out in his excellent study, The Phoenix and
the Spider, Dostoevski, a man endowed like Ivan Karamazov with a
"Euclidian mind," was most realistically in possession of his material in
his scenes of mystical insight.
The metaphysical and the supernatural are the fourth dimension of his universe, yet they
remain a projection of our three-dimensional world. Even the ideal and the symbolic spring
in him from the Western sense of reality, and this is why all his work is a "prologue on
earth." 30
Dostoevski's religious intuitions inevitably penetrate the texture of

his writing. He believed, and with what creative intensity, in the ideal
30 Renato Poggioli, The Phoenix and the Spider. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1957. pp. 31-32.
embodied in the figure of Christ, yet he fiercely attacked the institution

of the Catholic Church. Though he longed to keep his faith pure, the
artist in him could not be pinned down by any single orthodoxy.
Though he proclaimed the virtue of self-sacrifice, the ideal of re-
nunciation that is basic to Christianity, and tried to exemplify these
ideals in his own life, his character betrayed many of the traits to be
found in Ivan. His nihilists are guilty of Luciferian pride, and it is their
pride that drives them to destruction. His heroes, as Gide points out,
"inherit the Kingdom of God only by the denial of mind and will and
the surrender of personality." 31
In the final analysis, it is not Dostoevski's philosophy or his religious
beliefs that make him supreme but his imaginative gift as a novelist.
The ideas contained in his novels are identified with the characters who
share them. Dostoevski is no special pleader, no religious propagandist.
Though he underlines the need to believe despite the recalcitrance of
reason and the absence of proof, he still maintains that everything must
be questioned. Though he writes with a religious purpose in mind, his
fiction is suffused with the living colors of reality in all their gradations
and compositional contrasts. Tormented all his life long by the problem
of the existence of God, he invariably pictures the religious life as a
struggle, full of untesolved and irreconcilable contradictions. Faith
must be affirmed despite all the secular forces which seem to reduce it
to absurdity. It is impossible to believe in God and it is impossible not
to believe: that is the dialectic of doubt, already explored by Kierke-
gaard, in which his characters are trapped. There are no easy and as-
sured triumphs of faith, and no miracles come to pass. The only way
out for the unregenerate atheist, Dostoevski seems to say, is to commit
suicide. Kirillov does!
31 Andre Gide, Dostoevsky, p. 98.

CHAPTER VI
THE LITERATURE OF SUICIDE
Only when the spiritual health of a culture declines does the suicidal
obsession as voiced in literature grow strong. A vital culture produces
a literature, as was true among the Greeks whom Nietzsche celebrated,
that joyously affirms the will to live; it may create a tragic but never a
suicidal art. It is only when the energy ebbs, when a society loses its
reason for being, that its literature begins to reflect a neurasthenic
condition; it becomes enamored of death and dissolution. The will that
was once fed by instinctual sources of energy, rooted confidently in the
womb of Nature, turns negative and destructive, tired of a life that is
not supported by a sure foundation of meaning. What was once
Dionysiac energy and intoxication, a creative outburst of sheer animal
faith, a capacity, born of immense courage, to face the Ground of Being
in all its mysteriousness and terror, degenerates into a morbid pre-
occupation with the metaphysics of death. Today the popular sport of
the intelligentsia is to condemn existence. Like Ivan Karamazov, they
are prepared to return their passport, but their gesture has only a
symbolic import. Like Ivan, despite their nihilistic logic, they cannot
take their own life. Sickly and disillusioned, they hold in contempt the
precious gift the gods have bestowed on them. Intellect overrides
instinct.
Not completely, of course. Literary suicides are not to be taken too
seriously. They are really cases of what might be called psychic or sym-
bolic suicide; the writers express the wish to die but fail to end their
own life. What they betray is the bankruptcy of the will. Novelists like
Celine, Paul Bowles, Sartre, and Camus betray all the symptoms of
what might be regarded as a philosophical neurosis. Fortunately, the
creative imagination, as in tragedy, provides its own method of cure
and redemption. Regardless of what the work seems to say, its whine
of distress, its poignant cry of alienation, its indictment of the gods, its
THE LI T ERA T U R E OF SUI C IDE 89
savage disgust with the sound and fury of existence, it serves a thera-
peutic purpose. Through his gesture of rebellion and repudiation, the
writer somehow manages to make his peace with life. The more gravely
he contemplates the dialectics of suicide, the more surely does he come
to perceive the absurdity of death that is self-sought and self-imposed.
In moments of creative sanity (and art is the expression of health, not
disease), he realizes the impotence of reason, its powerlessness to un-
ravel the Gordian knot of existence, to solve the riddle ever propounded
anev.' by the eternal sphinx.
The will to live triumphs over all obstacles, all suffering, even the
absolute of despair; it is indestructible. When Raskolnikov, delirious
with fever, tormented by the thought of the murder he has committed,
faces the idea of suicide, he is held back by this indefeasible will to live.
"Where is it I've read," he broods, "that some one condemned to death says or thinks,
an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow
ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean. everlasting darkness, everlasting
solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of
space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at
once! Life, whatever it may be!" 1
Life, whatever it may be, under the most horrible of conditions! That
is the categorical imperative of instinct. How can the mind cast off this
illusion, if illusion it be, that clings so desperately to life? The fun-
damental premise that governs all mankind the world over is that life,
despite the buffeting seas of adversity, is good. That is the belief which
no species of rationalism can conquer. Here is the manifestation of ani-
mal faith that confounds all the demonstrations of logic. Whereas the
Buddhists can, by austere self-discipline, tame the raging fever of the
will to live and embrace the goal of Nirvana, or nothingness, for the
intellectuals of the West such a consummation is not only repugnant
but inconceivable. They must find metaphysical sanctions for their
negation of life. On one condition only can they justify self-murder:
that life becomes unbearable. In recommending suicide as salvation, it
is thus not death they are celebrating; it is not Nirvana they seek, es-
cape from the coil of Being, the wheel of suffering; they are energet-
ically protesting against a form of life that fails to satisfy their ex-
pectations. Paradoxically, symbolic suicide is an act of affirmation.
In discussing the literature of suicide as it grows out of the grievous
knowledge of the absence or the death of God, we are not referring to
1 Fyodor Dostoevski, Crime and Ptlll;.rhment. Translated by Constance Garnett. Cleve-
land and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1947, pp. 153-154.
characters who, driven by failure or disease or mutilation or extreme

pain, decide to take their exit from the stage of life. There is nothing
either heroic or tragic in such an ending. It may, as is the case with
Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, communicate a deep sense of
the pathos of existence but not the specifically tragic emotion, which
is exalted and liberating, springing as it does from a flash of insight
that transcends the illusions of time and the phantasmagorias of the
world of appearance. The tragic hero who resorts to suicide retains his
dignity, his grandeur, his nobility of spirit, to the very last. He may
reach a point not far removed from madness, but the justification he
gives - and there must always be present an imaginatively convincing
principle of justification - is never paltry or pitiful. He is imbued with
a spirit of greatness as, in his opposition to the superior power of neces-
sity, he prepares to bring about his own doom. In his decision to die
he implicates all of life, God, the whole universe. Because he refuses
to compromise, because he is willing to die for the sake of an ideal
which he realizes can perhaps never be achieved on earth, because he
thus passes judgment on life, he enables the living to identify them-
selves with his fate and thus, strange as it may seem, intensify and
enrich their sense of life. For he dies as a rebel, not as a whimpering
coward.
Suicides that reach the tragic heights in literature are thus never
either psychopathological or purposeless. The suicide of a madman, for
example, would lack tragic meaning. Even Kirillov's suicide, in The
Possessed, is not a gratuitous act; it is a defiance of God and a promise,
however deranged, of salvation for mankind. Septimus Smith, the
demented war veteran in Mrs. Dalloway, awakens our compassion, but
he remains at best an inarticulate, pathetic figure in the background. It
is what he suffers that awakens our sense of pity, not the quality of his
insight or the stand he takes against life. The suicides who climb to
tragic heights are those who know, or think they know, what they are
doing and why. They are the metaphysical suicides, those who relent-
lessly question life and find it utterly lacking. What it lacks is the
nourishing bread of meaning, a nobly sustaining purpose, a pattern of
justification. It is their perception of cosmic absurdity - a vision that
fills them with "nausea" - that leads them to seek death. Unable to
endure a life that is meaningless, they can either go mad like Ivan
or commit suicide like Stavrogin. Perhaps their decision to commit
suicide is in itself a form of madness.
In Gide's fiction, the gratuitous act is a deliberate violation of law
and morality. The protagonist murders not for profit but without
reason. In Dostoevski's fiction the gratuitous act leads to suicide, only
it is blended with a religious motive: the mythic self-crucifixion of the
hero as a means of saving mankind from the enslaving illusion of God.
It is the man-god who is exalted. What is of signal interest in this
strategy of motivation is that the discovery of the absurd culminates in
absurdity. The suicidal act is shown, by both Dostoevski and Camus, to
be as much a matter of faith as the Pascalian wager or the Kierkegaar-
dian leap. Were it not so, were these sacrificial heroes not actuated in
their suicide by some humanly meaningful motive, it is doubtful if they
could be fruitfully handled in literature. The characters who die because
of grief or psychosis or financial loss or the shock of failure are not
tragic figures. They die and are forgotten. The writer who with ima-
ginative power portrays metaphysical suicide has added a new value to
the life of literature. He has brought up the gods for trial, he has
passed judgment on life, he has undermined the foundations of faith,
he has overcome the tyranny of the flesh, the despotism of instinct.
Our thesis holds that literary suicide is tragic only when it is rooted
in a metaphysical or "principled" rejection of life. Not that this needs
to be reasoned our in logical terms; logic is not the ruler of life. It is the
internal "logic" that counts, the battle the protagonist fights within
the fastness of the mind, the motives that finally prompt him to say no
to life. Like Stavrogin, he finds life not worth having and (after having
experimented with all the drugs, all the pleasures, all the perversions)
gives it up in disdain, knowing as he does so that even this final gesture
is futile.
This is the nihilism that dominates a large part of Existentialist
literature. Once God ceases to be the creator and controller of the
human drama, once existence is infected with the cancer of absurdity,
then death, like life, becomes irremediably absurd. The modern hero
expects to achieve nothing by his act of suicide. His protest is without
consequences; it is useless. That is why Kirillov is fundamentally an
unheroic, if fanatical, character. He is obsessed, and yet convinced by
his obsession that he is eminently sane in his messianic ambition; he
will emancipate humanity from the lie of religion, their craven, in-
fantile dependence on God. By killing himself, he will prove that man
is God. His suicide will be the first revolutionary demonstration of
godlike freedom, a blow directed against the will of God.
Kirillov is, from the beginning, searching for the underlying reason
why men are afraid to kill themselves. Two prejudices, he feels, restrain
people from leaping into the vast indifference of death: one is the fear
of pain, a small prejudice; the other stems from the fear of what will
happen in the other world. Furthermore, there are two types of suicides:
those who kill themselves out of passion, sorrow, or revenge, not deter-
red by anticipation of pain; the metaphysical suicides belong to the
other type, those who kill themselves as the result of reasoning. Kirillov
has worked out what he considers a perfectly logical theory of salvation.
"There will be full freedom when it will be just the same to live or
not to live. That's the goal for alL" 2 Once this truth is grasped, then
no one will care to live. To the sensible objection raised that if man
fears death it is because he loves life, a powerful instinct implanted by
nature, Kirillov, the philosopher of death, has his answer ready. That is
the very deception he is determined to unmask.
Kirillov declares that he has always been surprised at the fact that
everyone goes on living. He has found his faith: "If there is no God,
then I am God." 8 If God exists, then He rules with an iron hand and
no one can escape from His will. If not, then Kirillov is free to assert
his self-will. That is how he can defeat God. He is resolved to manifest
his self-will, and the highest manifestation of self-will is to kill him-
self, without any cause at all. Here is the Promethean rebel who will be
the first to disprove the existence of God. "What is there to live for?"
The laws of Nature did not spare Christ, who died for a lie and thus
revealed that all of life is a hideous mockery. It is belief in the old
God that is responsible for all the suffering of man. Kirillov's religious
mania emerges most clearly, in a passage we have already referred to,
when he defends "the logic" of his proposed action:
"I can't understand how an atheist could know that there is no God and not kill himself
on the spot. To recognise that there is no God and not to recognise at the same instant
that one is God oneself is an absurdity, else one would certainly kill oneself. If you
recognise it you are sovereign, and then you won't kill yourself but will live in the
greatest glory. But one, the first, must kill himself, for else who will begin and prove
it?" 5
By this act of irrefragable proof he will abolish the fear of death. By

asserting his self-will, he is bound "to believe that I don't believe." 6
This is the terrible new age of freedom he is ushering in.
The contradictions in Kirillov's position are all too apparent; he is a
2 Fyodor Dostoevski. The Possessed. Translated by Constance Garnett. New York: The
3 Ibid., p. 580.
4 Ibid., p. 582.
5 Ibid., p. 582.
6 Ibid., p. 582.
THE LIT ERA T U R E OF SUI C IDE 93
religious fanatic, a mad mystic, who has dedicated himself, like

Nietzsche, to the task of annihilating God. He is fond of life, even
though he has decided to shoot himself. He does not believe in an
eternal life after death, only in eternal life here on earth. He believes
that the new Savior will come and his name will be the man-god.
Kirillov's suicide is a ritualistic act of sacrifice. The next stage in the
evolution of the race will witness the extinction of God, but first
someone must act as the assassin of God and reveal the mighty, liber-
ating secret that there is nothing to fear, not even death.
Dostoevski contrasts Kirillov's suicide with that of Stavrogin. The
latter suffers from hallucinations - the fate Dostoevski reserves for the
nihilistic rebels like Raskolnikov and Ivan. Stavrogin feels homeless on
earth, without close ties of any kind, incapable of giving hinlself in
love or in faith. He has tried his strength everywhere and has not learn-
ed to know himself. He does not know what to do with his energy, his
time, his talent. He derives pleasure from evil though he desires to do
good. What troubles him intensely and at last drives him to suicide is
the discovery he makes that his desires are too weak to guide him. He is
a man without hope as he is without faith. He cannot feel and there-
fore cannot believe. He cannot share the utopian dreams of the re-
volutionists. He has lost connection not only with his country but his
roots. He is nothing. From him, as he realizes toward the end, nothing
has come but negation, and even this was without greatness, without
force. Kirillov could at least be carried away by the passion of an idea
and take his life; Kirillov was a great soul because he could lose his
reason. Stavrogin declares: "1 can never lose my reason, and I can never
believe in an idea to such a degree as he did .... 1 can never, never
shoot myself." 7 This is the punishment he must bear: he blew neither
hot nor cold; he could not transcend his analytical, ironic mind. He is
afraid of suicide: the supreme act of absurdity in a drama of life that he
regarded as inexpressibly absurd. Even the act of killing himself will
be, he knows, another sham - "the last deception in an endless series of
deceptions." 8 Yet he returns home and hangs himself in the loft.
Despair had conquered his titanic pride.
Dostoevski is important for our study because he prophetically anti-
cipated many of the trends of modern fiction. Once the religious sense
was banished from literature, the human being ceased to possess any
genuine importance. Nietzsche, in The Genealogy of Morals, showed
7 Ibid., p. 635.
8 Ibid., p. 636.
how the growth of science resulted in a loss of individuality, the

reduction of the hwnan being to atomistic insignificance. If the novelist
were to accept this scientific version of hwnan nature, his art would be
severely damaged. We have already analyzed the image of the alienated
self as it appears in the body of twentieth-century literature. To escape
the trap of determinism, the modern writer focuses on dreams, in-
trospections, the inner world of man. A Catholic novelist like Graham
Greene, instead of portraying a gray, neutral universe of energy, draws
a vivid, if heretical, picture of the struggle between good and evil, the
efforts the sin-beleaguered soul puts forth to save itself from dam-
nation, but though his characters are saved by their thoughts, their state
of grace, they lack the depth, the metaphysical passion of Dostoevski's
dramatis personae. For despite his defiant lapse into heresy, Graham
Greene, who will be the subject of a later chapter, was still too restrict-
ed by his Catholicism to achieve the dimension of universality. In a
personal essay, "The Revolver in the Cupboard," he describes his early
obsession with suicide and his scheme for carrying it out. Like Stavrogin
he was perpetually bored; freedom bored him. When his attempt at
shooting himself( he played revolver roulette) failed, he became bored
with these pseudo-suicides. But the problem of suicide is not delineated
in his novels except in The Heart of the Matter, where it is tied up with
the religious issue.
It is Existentialist fiction that projects with intense imaginative pes-
simism the realization of man's nothingness. Man's existence contains
its own negation and is headed inevitably toward death. Man is op-
pressed by the sense of his finitude, his involvement in death. As he
contemplates his own mortality, he achieves the gift of freedom, but
out of it springs the feeling of dread: the perception that he hangs
precariously over the abyss of nothingness.
Hence he comes to face the question: why live? The Existentialist
writer concerns himself of necessity with the problem of the meaning
of life. Thus we come back to the ontological and religious contra-
dictions that tormented Dostoevski's principal characters. It is in the
inaccessible privacy of the heart that the energy is born to make an end
of it all and that man leaps Out of the circle of time. That is where the
determination to commit suicide has its inception. When man glimpses
the blinding truth of nothingess, he is plunged into eternal night.
Somewhere, at some point in his journey to the end of darkness, he
breaks his attachment to life and arrives at this fateful decision. What
does such a decision reveal if not that life is too much for the man; he
no longer considers it worth the trouble to go on living. By consenting

to death, he recognizes the absurdity of all attitudes, even this habitual
love of life. Why suffer? Why strive? For what purpose?
Suddenly he is overcome with the feeling, numinous in character,
that he is an utter stranger in a universe which is not only indifferent to
his needs and ideals but completely incomprehensible. Deprived of all
consolatory illusions, he regards himself as an alien on earth, whose
life - and all of life as a matter of fact - is absurd. Once he apprehends
this shattering truth, what is he to do? Is suicide, Camus asks in The
Myth of Sisyphus, the only logical alternative? Yet many who negate
the world still cling tenaciously to life. Rare indeed is it to find a per-
fect consistency between theory and conduct. The will to live is not to
be broken by dint of philosophical argument. Life surpasses thought;
the body, by a perverse, unconquerable logic of its own, triumphs over
the mandates of reason. Hence man tends to flee from the consequences
of his thinking, to evade the ultimate issue; he builds up high the tower
of hope - the hope of immortality, redemption through faith in God,
devotion to some cause that will fill his life with meaning. This is the
biological illusion that betrays him.
But if he is actually convinced that life has no meaning, does it there-
fore follow that it is not worth living? Why do people commit suicide?
Does the perception of absurdity poisoning all of existence lead
to suicide? As Camus phrases is, "Does the absurd dictate Death?" 9
What does logic reveal when it is pursued inexorably to the end? Do
human beings obey the principle of logic even to the absurd climax of
death? The reasoning is in itself highly absurd. The fountains of feeling
are not to be overlooked; they flow from mysterious subterranean
sources and they disclose more, much more, than the language in which
we attempt to clothe them. And these feelings are made known to us in
fitful glimpses by our actions and commitments, by what we believe or
think we believe, by our illusions as well as our sincerity. Feelings thus
disclose themselves by the actions they motivate, the state of mind they
support. Hence Camus maintains that true knowledge cannot be
achieved; that is why it is so difficult to define the feeling of absurdity.
How shall one deal with this aberration of absurdity? The main thing
is not to compromise, not to draw back in fear from the implications of
the truth. The absurd man - that is the phrase Camus uses - seeks to
9 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus. Translated by Justin O'Brien. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1955, p. 9.
discover if it is possible to live without appealing to supernatural

powers.
Again the problem of suicide arises. The absurd man knows that in
living he keeps the sense of the absurd alive. Camus then proceeds to
demonstrate - by no means convincingly - why absurd experience is
remote from suicide. Whereas the suicide accepts existence, the man in
revolt refuses to do so. The former anticipates his end in the future and
thus settles the problem of the absurd, whereas the absurd man rejects
death. He confronts reality without illusions. In short, revolt is the
opposite of renunciation. Suicide is repudiation. The absurd man relies
on his ultimate weapon - defiance.
Like Kirillov, Camus asks if man is free or is subject to a master. If
God exists, then man is not free and God must stand condemned as the
originator or evil. 1£ man is free, then he must bear the full responsibili-
ty for his actions. God is the negation of human freedom. To have
freedom - that means freedom to think and to act. The philosophy of
the absurd, while it abolishes the kingdom of eternity, restores freedom
to man. But even this is an illusion. The numinous encounter with the
absurd destroys all possibility of meaning. Death is not only the sole
reality but the supreme absurdity. Nothing in this condition can be
changed. But without this assurance of eternity, what value can free-
dom possibly have?
Once the double illusion of freedom and of a high purpose to be
fulfilled in life is destroyed, man is truly free, for he has been liberated
from the myth of the future. The absurd man finally accepts a universe
which is incomprehensible; he finally accepts a life that is without
hope. Rejecting the solution offered by suicide, Camus stresses the im-
portance of being aware of one's life to the utmost, to see clearly, to
refuse the temptation of death.
Camus therefore concludes that the novelist must keep faith with the
absurd and renounce every illusion. He points to The Possessed as a
classic example of the absurd. If life is indeed absurd, then why not
condemn Nature and make an end of it all? Kirillov takes his life
because he is possessed by an idea. His suicide is an act of revolt; he
behaves absurdly but his action is dictated by an overwhelming am-
bition. He illustrates the tragic dilemma of the intellectual who con-
fronts life in a universe that has no God. That is his besetting madness
and yet he is not mad. By symbolically slaying God he usurps his
power. He kills himself in order to liberate man from the thraldom of
hope. Strangely enough, it is out of love for deluded mankind that he
takes his life. He is the first Existentialist hero, the personification of

the absurd.
The modern fictional protagonist, living in an age of Freud, global
wars, atomic bombs, and genocidal horrors, is thrust into a reality and
a world of time that is radically different from the one in which the
Dostoevskian hero lived. The modern "hero" who debates whether or
not to commit suicide is passing judgment on the quality of life in the
twentieth century. It is society that he is condemning as well as the uni-
verse at large. If he cannot believe in the Second Coming, if time
stretches out meaninglessly to the crack of doom, then being alive is a
useless privilege. Like Quentin in The Sound and the Fury, the modern
"hero," before he commits suicide, is obsessed with the burden of time.
It is this obsession with time that adds a new dimension to the metaphy-
sics of absurdity.
The twentieth-century literary obsession with time is psychologically
linked with the awareness of death. 10 Man cannot reverse the move-
ment of time, since each moment lived draws him closer to the end.
Time is his burden and his doom because it brings painfully before him
the knowledge of his own death. Here is the existential contradiction
that overshadows all of life: time the creator and destroyer, womb and
tomb. All that man strives for so earnestly may be cut short by the
coming of death. This is the specter that haunts the imagination of
modern man - the realization of the futility of life dominated by time.
But few of the characters in contemporary fiction who utter an Ever-
lasting Nay ever commit suicide. They seem to have no intention of
bidding this farcical world good-bye. Why die and thus give up the
opportunity of condemning a world which is steeped in absurdity? They
curse existence, these rebels, at the same time that they refuse to aban-
don it. If there is a lack of logic in the role they play, this is the fault of
logic, not of life. If man dies, he loses everything. It is the threat of
death, not the suicidal compulsion, that is the recurrent motif in con-
temporary literature.
The modern literati have achieved an uneasy truce with the finality
of death. Absurdity drives out the logical necessity for dying by one's
own hand; if it is absurd to live it is even more absurd to die. Camus
voices the courage of the humanist who, having disposed of God and
the question of immortality, is resolved to live as fully as he can (his
death by accident in a speeding car was a cruel confirmation of his
10 This theme is analyzed by the author in his book, Literature and Religion. Dallas:
Southern Methodist University Press, 1960, pp. 40-41.
philosophy of the absurd) while he protests against the universal in-

justice of death. But it is difficult, if not downright foolish, to argue
with a literary proponent of the absurd. As long as one decides to live
on - and the writer has already decided that by composing a book -
then the only conceivable purpose of life is richness of experience, the
fulfillment of the self. The creative man may, like Dostoevski or
Camus, question the ultimate meaning of existence, he may even
perceive and attempt to reveal the essential absurdity of the uni-
verse and man's place in it, but he will never look upon his own
productions as absurd. To recognize absurdity and to live productively
in the face of it - that, too, is an affirmation of the courage to be. The
writer has gazed into the dark heart of being and he is under an inner
necessity, that transcends the metaphysics of absurdity, to deliver an
imaginative report of the truth of his experience. The supreme absurdity
of the twentieth-century writer is that, believing neither in the man-
god nor in the God-man, he still goes on living productively. That is
how the creative life-force surges up in him and triumphs over the
death-instinct. He continues his quixotic quest for a God, the source
and center of all ontological meaning, even though his reason acknow-
ledges the impossibility of faith. For those writers for whom the act
of symbolic suicide is out of the question, those who refuse to take the
mystical leap, the passage through the dark night of the soul, as they
wait for the silence that must eventually come and put an end to the
madness of living - for such writers there is only one choice open: like
Samuel Beckett, they must endeavor to create the vital form of tragedy
out of their confrontation of nothingness.
For Beckett's fiction draws a portrait of modern consciousness as
solipsistic and inarticulate, drowned in existential dread and despair,
without the solace or certitude of faith. In a series of novels - and plays
as well - designed to overcome the necessity for literature, Beckett
experiments with the aesthetics of nihilism and celebrates the absolute
of nothingness which will ultimately destroy all human consciousness.
He voices no humanistic evangel except to reiterate the same forlorn
theme that one must go on, even though there is no reason and no
desire for doing so. His work represents a courageous, if frustrated, ef-
fort to embody a creative vision based on a foundation of meaningless-
ness. 11
11 See Charles I. Glicksberg, "Samuel Beckett's World of Fiction," Arizona Quaterly,
XVIII (Spring 1962), pp. 32-47. Revised version printed in Charles I. Glicksberg, The
Self in Modern Literature. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1964, pp.
128-133.
THE LITERATURE OF SUICIDE 99
When literary nihilism, in defiance of all logic, is carried to an

extreme, it then comes full circle and approaches the condition of
"negative theology." It is a vain endeavor. It is impossible to communi-
cate this apprehension of what lies beyond sense and cognition, word
and concept: the experience of what is called the tremendum mys-
terium, the Wholly Other, the Unconditioned, what Heidegger, in his
terminology, refers to as the Nothing. Just as God cannot be an object
of aesthetic concern, so the nihilist cannot find an objective correlative
for the aesthetics of nothingness. If an unbridgeable gulf divides the
natural from the divine, man from God, then no meaningful assertion
can be made about ultimate reality, and that is what the literary nihilist,
who is a mystic manque, discovers for himself: he must struggle
ineffectually to speak about the enigma of that which cannot be
spoken. God, according to Tillich, "transcends everything that can be
said about him, and therefore it must be denied in the moment in
which it is said." 12 That is the dialectical method Beckett utilizes in
presenting his characters, who represent Everyman, perpetually ques-
tioning the sphinx of existence and forever denying whatever pro-
visional hypotheses they entertain.
But there is a profound difference between the dialogue with God
that a theologian like Tillich carries on, apart from the question of
literary form and art, and Beckett's confrontation of the mystery of
being. Beckett, like the Gnostics, emphasizes the paradoxical nature of
a God who renders all symbols of thought null and void, a God whose
essence cannot be reduced to objective categories drawn from the realm
of matter. All that can be known of God is his unknowability, and it is
precisely this insight which gives rise to the via negationis, the nu-
minous vision of nothingness that rejects not only the theistic outlook
but also the ideals of humanism.
12 Paul Tillich, "The Word of God," in Ruth Nanda Anshen (ed.), Language: An
Enquiry into Its Meaning and Function. New York: Harper & Bros., 1957, p. 133.
CHAPTER VII
THE NUMINOUS IN FICTION
Difficult indeed is the struggle of the artist in poetry or prose to limn

the picture of the other world, beyond the comprehension of sense and
yet "real" and always present to him, even if he cannot give it a local
habitation and a name. It is connected, this vision, with the dualism
the Christian writer feels intensely: both worlds must be brought into
a living relationship, for each world serves to influence the other.
Otherworldliness that severs all ties with the human, the things of this
earth, spells, as we have maintained, the death of art. A this-worldly
approach that catches no hint of any ultimate meaning falls into the
despair of silence that is Samuel Beckett's characteristic note. For it is
this tensely held awareness of the contrast between the ideal and the
actual, the finite and the infinite, the religious insight and the behavior-
al fact, which makes for the tragic sense of life. Many of the major
novelists of the nineteenth century - Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Melville,
Hawthorne - beheld this numinous vision and believed in it, though
they interpreted it in strikingly different ways. For them it was a ge-
nuine and vital, if mysterious and paradoxical, experience.
This dimension of the complex art of fiction cannot be learned by
study or practice; it cannot even be explained; like the ineffable vision
reported by the mystics it can only be hinted at or suggested, not stated.
It is a glimpse of something deeply interfused, so that the writer sees
into the life of things: a glimpse of perspectives that stretch beyond
the present historical situation, meanings that are inexhaustible, truths
that lie beyond the reach of utterance, a perception of darkness that can
be shattered, if at all, by the meditation of symbol or myth. This is the
numinous element in the novel, what Joyce calls "epiphanies." Both are
religious terms and perhaps they help by a process of association to
bring us to the heart of the matter. It occurs, this numinous vision, on
the part of a character in a moment of existential crisis, be it grief or
THE NUMINOUS IN FICTION 101
terror or abandonment or fear or utter defeat. The man is deprived of

his accustomed drugs, the familiar and reassuring aspects of reality, the
streets on which he has walked, the house in which he lives, the clock
ticking on his dresser, the books in his library bearing his book plate
and his special markings and his thumbprints. Now he has discarded all
this. Having wandered beyond the boundaries of the diurnal world, he
sees, as it were, into the dark or luminous center of things, the heart of
being that is as vast as space and as empty or radiant as the sky above
him.
But the numinous vision, as it is presented in the novel, must be
dramatically prepared for; it cannot be forced. One can think at
random of numerous such scenes in the novels he admires: Hans
Castorp on the snowy slopes of the Alps experiencing a terrifying
moment - it is eternity - of death; the Prince lying wounded on the
battlefield in War and Peace. Ulysses, like A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man, contains a score of such passages. Their presence is a
tribute to the highest power of the creative imagination. James Agee
achieves this dimension in A Death in the Family; the novel is crowded
thick with it, for it is true that to the eye of a mystic like Blake every
moment is instinct with eternity and every experience is divine. For
example, Agee describes the family gathered together before the fire
after learning of the death of one member of the family, and as they
sit there they hear the footsteps of a man, walking slowly, passing the
house, and then vanishing into silence; "and in the silence of the uni-
verse they listened to their little fire." 1 It is the rightness of the phrase,
"the silence of the universe," which captures the numinous mood, the
epiphany of tragic awareness, the heightened perception of the contrast
between the little fire in the hearth, which is their only source of light,
and the darkness and silence which are overwhelming and universal.
Man is alone and his grief is not to be comforted, but that is an abstract
and stale way of putting it compared to this sudden "knowledge" of the
utter and illimitable silence as these characters sit before the fire and
bear the burden of despair.
Our thesis throughout this book has been that the absence or death
of God in twentieth-century literature left a void that had to be filled.
The mystery of being remained as a dark, disturbing challenge, the
enigma of nothingness, the inexplicable paradox that life has its cul-
mination - can we say its completion? - in death. There is no Shatov in
modern fiction to proclaim that a great people must believe in its
1 James Agee, A Death in the Family. New York: Avon Books, 1964, p. 122.
sacred mission on earth and take on a messianic role of leadership by

broadcasting its faith in its own true God. There is no Shatov to tell the
spiritually bankrupt Stavrogin: "Attain to God by work; it all lies in
that; or disappear like rotten mildew." 2 The sense of the numinous
takes the place of the lost or absent God, but it is a numinosity that,
like the Joycean epiphanies, is cut off from the assured sources of
supernal grace. It is this numinous element, always ambiguous in mean-
ing, that is developed with superb imaginative insight and dramatic
control in A Death in the Family.
"Religious" in feeling and vision and above all in tone, this novel is
never dogmatic in content. Structurally it is complexly organized, a
series of intricately meshed flashbacks, the fitful play of memory
polarized by a single event, the death of the father in an automobile
accident. It has no plot to speak of and its unity is derived principally
from a unity of mood, cumulative in its intensity, motivated by the
sudden and shocking fact of death. The accident remains an accident
and yet by its abruptness, by emphasizing the finality of death, it brings
in overtones of the infinite, the questioning of God's wisdom and mercy
and justice.
The tone establishes the timelessness and universality of the theme.
Even a moment the boy spends, in recollection, with his father vibrates
with the resonance of the infinite, and yet it is etched with sensory im-
mediacy, this recall of a moment when the boy and his father sat on a
rock, together and estranged in a loneliness that surrounds all men.
Agee is able to capture and communicate this elusive awareness of the
strangeness and wonder of existence, dialectically fusing the inner and
outer, sense and sensibility, imagination and reality, hinting at a
"knowledge" that cannot be put into words. It is this knowledge, es-
sentially the province of the visionary poet, that is the special distinc-
tion of Agee's fiction, just as it unmistakably marked the prose of his
first book, a documentary, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
Then comes the shrill call of the telephone, the fateful summons,
and Jay Follett must rush to the bedside of his father. The story then
shifts back to Mary, the wife, and her introspections, the complications
of their marriage. When she finds herself thinking that the death of
Jay's father would be a relief, she is stricken with guilt and begs God
(she is intensely religious) for forgiveness. But her prayer for forgiven-
ess, though it comforts her, does not remove the inner disturbance, for
2 F,·odor Dostoevski. The Possessed. Translated by Constance Garnett. New York: The
Macn{illan Company, 1916, p. 238.
there is a religious difference between husband and wife and she feared
it would inevitably widen with the years because she was determined
to bring up the children as Catholic children should be brought up.
Agee's treatment of her religious search is handled with a fine blending
of sympathy and objectivity. God remains ambiguously in the back-
ground, his intention undisclosed. God simply bids her do as her
conscience dictates, bring up her children devoutly in the faith. She
must trust in God and carry out his wilL
When she tries to make clear to her children what death means, the
incongruities of the explanation that religon offers stand out sharply,
for the children cannot grasp these abstractions about death as a sleep
and waking up in heaven. The boy, remembering what happened to the
cat, asks if there is a special heaven for cats. And what about the
rabbits killed and mangled by the dogs, would they, too, wake up? The
mother replies:
"No, Rufus, that was only their poor little bodies. God wouldn't let them wake up all
hurt and bloody, poor things."
"Why did God let the dogs in?"
"We don't know, Rufus, but it must be a part of His plan we will understand some
day."
"What good would it do Him?"
"Children, don't dawdle. It's almost school time."
"What good would it do Him, Mama, to let the dogs in?"
"I don't know, but someday we'll understand, Rufus, if we're very patient. We mustn't
trouble ourselves with these things we can't understand. We just have to be sure that
God knows best."
"I bet they sneaked in when He wasn't looking," Rufus said eagerly. "Cause He sure
wouldn't have let them if He'd been there. Didn't they, Mama? Didn't they?" 3
The mother is careful to explain that God knows everything and

sees everything but that the Devil is let loose on earth and tempts
people into sin, and God does not interfere. But why, Rufus wants to
know, using the ingenuous logic of children, does God allow men to
do bad things? What is free will? The mother informs him that he
could not love God if love were something forced on him. But if God
is all-powerful, why can't He do everything? Why should He refuse to
adopt the easy solution? All the mother can say emphatically is that
God does not choose to take the easy way, for Himself or mankind.
Man must endure the search, the struggle.
Complexity in this novel is achieved by viewing the tragedy through
the eyes of the different characters. Mary, after Jay is killed, knows she
must try to be strong and learn how to accept life. Aunt Hannah, a
3 James Agee, A Death in the Family, p. 49.
devout believer, gains the knowledge that the fate of suffering must be
borne by each one. When the members of the family kneel in prayer,
she knows that God is not in the room. At times even her staunch
faith is smitten with this doubt of which she cannot rid herself as she
feels opening within herself "a chasm of infinite darkness" from which
flows "the paralyzing breath of eternal darkness." 4 "I believe nothing.
Nothing whatever." 5 Mary's father, an agnostic, believes that life must
be endured, that is all, and its malignant cruelties borne with steadfast
courage. He tells his daughter that no one is exempt, each one may be
singled out as the next victim, "without any warning or any regard for
justice." 6
Each one of the characters in the family is caught in this tragic situ-
ation, trapped in his own prison of loneliness. Andrew, the brother,
watching Mary convulsed with grief, is angered at God who is capable
of permitting this to happen. Mary, however, has asked forgiveness of
God for feeling that God had purposely tormented her. What, asks
Aunt Hannah, had Christ cried out on the cross? But if he didn't ask
for forgiveness, Mary replies, it was because he was God. These
religious issues crop up repeatedly in A Death in the Family, but always
they are held in balance, contrasted with the demonism of doubt, the
ironies of existence, the bitter temptation to deny the faith. It is death
that has brought them together, it is death that has suddenly intensified
their awareness of the precariousness and mysteriousness of life. Mary's
father remains convinced that life does not make any sense; there is
no purpose to the decisions men make or the actions they commit. He
knows that he does not know, that things beyond the comprehension of
reason cannot be known. He must follow the guide of his senses; if he
cannot rely on them, then he might as well believe anything in the
world. Faith in God, as far as he is concerned, is out of the question;
he cannot utter the word "faith" and let that settle all problems. Faith
solves nothing for him; he has no faith, even though he is aware that it
would not hurt him if he did. He does not consider himself an atheist.
"Seems as unfounded to me to say there isn't a God as to say there is.
You can't prove it either way. But that's it: I've got to have proof." 7
Few modern novels have succeeded, without harping morbidly on
death, in communicating so poignantly this numinous trauma of Tha-
natos. Here is portrayed the Dostoevskian complexity of the spiritual
4 Ibid., p. 105.
5 Ibid., p. 105.
6 Ibid., p. 119.
7 Ibid., p. 148.
struggle; the religious issue is presented with dramatic tension from

contrasting and irreconcilable angles of vision, as if Mary and her
father spoke different languages and dwelt in two alien climates of
thought. It is this religious discussion that lends a tragic cutting edge to
the novel. Agee does not evade the contradictions involved in the
affirmation of faith in the face of the appalling reality of death. He
does not take sides in this existential conflict, he is not seeking to
uphold or undermine the faith. During the funeral scene he draws a
satiric portrait of the priest praying so confidently to God, sure he is
right in the words he sends up to Heaven, acting as if he were privy to
God's will. This is the dogmatic finality and fixity of faith that Agee
exposes as a sham and an obscenity. Andrew resents the refusal of the
priest to read the complete burial service over the body because Jay
Follett had never been baptized. Is this Christian?
"Genuflecting, and ducking and bowing and scraping, and basting themselves with signs
of the Cross. and all that disgusting hocus-pocus. and you come to one simple, single
act of Christian charity and what happens? The rules of the Church forbid it. He's not a
member of our little club." 8
Hemingway speaks of a fourth dimension in the novel but he uses

it largely in connection with style. This numinous vision that emerges
with such hallucinatory intensity in A Death in the Family transcends
the literary context, though it obviously arises out of it. It marks the
can junction of life and literature, art and vision, the word and the
Word, the finite and the infinite, the form and the spirit. If it is not to
be confused with style neither is it to be identified with atmosphere or
tone or mood or rhythm. It is not something added, a grace of words,
a gift of expression, an intensification of dramatic experience. It is the
Holy Ghost of vision, intrinsic, pure, and it comes unbidden, without
search or effort. It represents the writer's way of seeing and com-
municating (the two are not, of course, the same and it is precisely
there the special difficulty lies, the danger of losing what is seen in
a welter of communicative obstacles) the tragicomic pattern of life, the
incongruous blend of laughter and tears, the polarities of existence.
The writer does not have to be formally religious or mystical to
record such perceptions of the numinous, but he must be highly im-
aginative, faithful to the inherent implications of his material, willing
to let his sensibility release itself without the interference of the sharply
logical intellect. Then, if he ceases to worry about God or immortality
or the silence of the universe or the universe of silence and concentrates
B Ibid., p. 253.
on resolving the conflicts inherent in his material- the sudden malign

stroke of fate, the malicious reversals of fortune, the miseries of disease
as well as poverty, the happiness that is so painful because it is so fu-
gitive, the time that flies heedlessly indifferent to human weal or woe,
the indifference of the stars shining down on a batlefield or on a city
destroyed by an atomic bomb - then, without knowing it, he will have
captured the substance and the secret of this vision. The whirring noise
of wings will be heard as Eternity enters into the sphere of time.
A number of nineteenth-century novels that have withstood the as-
saults of time are rich in this archetypal element of the numinous; it
is present in War and Peace, occasionally in the work of Henry James,
in The House of Seven Gables (in the famous, metaphysically fright-
ening eighteenth chapter describing Judge Pyncheon, a stricken victim
of time), and particularly in The Marble Faun, and in many of the
short tales and sketches Hawthorne composed. It is Dostoevski, how-
ever, who is the clairvoyant of vision, the prophetic discoverer of the
demons and gods that haunt the world of the unconscious. For example,
in The Idiot, he gives a vividly detailed description of the onset of an
attack of epilepsy.
The sense of life, the consciousness of self, were multiplied ten times at these moments
which passed like a flash of lightning. His mind and his heart were flooded with extra-
ordinary light; all his uneasiness, all his doubts, all his anxieties were ... merged in a lofty
calm. full of serene, harmonious joy and hope.9
Then came the culmination, the final second of the minute when the
fit actually exploded, the second of supernal vision and numinous
revelation. He felt the very pulsebeat of life, and for the sake of
experiencing such moments Prince Myshkin felt that one ought to be
willing to sacrifice one's whole life, even though he later paid the price
for such seizures by falling into nether darkness. The moment of
illumination was mystical, ineffable, in that it enabled him to under-
stand what is meant by timelessness. Or there is the unforgettable scene
in The Possessed when Kirillov is planning to demonstrate his defiance
of God by killing himself. He, too, experiences moments of the eternal
harmony, seconds of mystical communion when he feels that he is in
the presence of something not of this earth. "This feeling," he declares,
"is clear and unmistakable; it's as though you apprehended all nature
and suddenly say, 'Yes, that's right.' God, when He created the world,
said at the end of each day of creation, 'Yes, it's right, it's good.' It... it's
9 Fyodor Dostoevski. The Idiot. Translated by Constance Garnett. New York: The
Macmillan Company. 1913, p. 224.
not being deeply moved, but simply joy." 10 It represents a truly re-
ligious illumination, an experience that can be endured for only a few
seconds. In these five seconds, Kirillov confesses, he lives through a
whole lifetime, and he is prepared to give his whole life for them,
because they are worth it.
Or consider The Magic Mountain. It contains, besides the profound
introspections on the nature of time and the psychoanalytic speculations
on love and disease and death, a description of Castorp'suncannyexperi-
ence in the mountains when he is caught in a raging snow storm and must
fight against the temptation of sinking into death. Life and death he dis-
covers are interrelated and interdependent. Death annuls all time. At
the sanatorium, high in the Alps, Hans, dabbling in the mystical, loses
all track of time, the distinction between now and then being merged
in a timeless eternity. He tries most conscientiously to counteract such
Oriental mysticism by sitting, watch in hand, studying the steady
movements of the second-hand, trying to catch time on the wing. But
this watch is mechanical, without feeling, without purpose or intelli-
gence or meaning. Within himself, however, tremendous changes are
taking place which no second-hand can measure. Who is he? What is
he in the process of becoming? How distinguish yesterday from today
since all the days, past and present, now and then, are confusingly
alike? Then comes a period when time is obliterated and he lives in a
dream beyond the realm of the temporal.
Thomas Mann, deeply influenced by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer,
serves as a figure of transition between the numinous sense of time and
the numinous perception of the absurd. The contemporary novelist of
the absurd is a humanistic nihilist who is convinced that the world
has no ascertainable meaning. As Albert Camus declares in The Myth
of Sisyphus: "But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it
is impossible for me just now to know it." 11 Here is the human limita-
tion above which the mind of man cannot rise in its finitude. The
numinous encounter with the absurd - it is that - destroys, as in Ca-
mus's The Stranger and in Beckett's fiction, all the illusions born of
hope and plunges man into utter darkness. He sees death, the sole
reality, waiting for him, and that is the acme of absurdity. Having
beheld the Gorgon-face of the absurd, he ceases to be deceived. What
the absurd man comes to realize - and it is his means of emancipation -
10 Fyodor Dostoevski, The Possessed. Translated by Constance Garnett. New York: The
11 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus. Translated by Justin O'Brien. New York:
Vintage Books, 1955, p. 38.
is that there is no future. Thus the knowledge of death and the ex-
perience of the absurd contribute to the only reasonable freedom man
can possess. The absurd man finally accepts a universe which is built on
nothingness.
The Existentialist novelists frequently give expression to this ex-
perience of the numinous, but in negative and nihilistic terms. When
the hero of Nausea, by Sanre, realizes that there is absolutely no reason
for existing, he comes to understand what "nausea" means. Whereas
before he had accepted appearances at their face value, dealing with
objects and men and categories without feeling that they really existed,
he now suddenly beholds existence unveil itself.
It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this
root was kneaded into existence. Or rather, the root. the park gates, the bench, the sparse
grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of th;ngs, their individuality. were only an
appearance, a veneer.12
Now he is able, as it were, to penetrate into the very essence, palpitating

and actual, of things, to get inside them. He has discovered the mean-
ing of existence, the clue to "nausea," the secret of his own life. He has
finally grasped the fundamental absurdity of existence.
This perception of cosmic absurdity is intimately related, as we have
tried to show, to the vision of the absolute. Like the mystic's com-
munion with God, it is ineffable. How describe it in relation to the
palpable, material objects surrounding us? The objects we behold are
not to be understood conceptually, through the instrumentality of
reason or logic. Their existence eludes all cognitive formulations. The
recognition of this existential truth induces a kind of horrible ecstasy;
it is not a moment of transfiguration but annihilation. The protagonist
in Nausea realizes that the essential thing is summed up in contingency.
"I mean that one cannot define existence as necessity. To exist is sim-
ply to be there; those who exist let themselves be encountered, but you
can never deduce anything from them." 13 The mystery of existence
remains inexplicable. When the truth of contingency is perceived at
last, the material world seems to dissolve. That is why most people try
desperately to escape from this truth, unable to reconcile themselves to
the suspicion that they have no reason for existing. It is clear that these
"numinous" encounters in Sanre's fiction, unlike the mystical ex-
perience, do not postulate a Reality behind the phenomenal world.
12 Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea. Translated by Uoyd Alexander. Norfolk, Conn.: New

Directions, 1949, p. 171.
13 I bid., p. 176.
They shadow forth the image of Nothingness, the specter of the con-
tingent and the absurd.
Every novel is the record of a pilgrimage, a quest, but today, un-
fortunately, the writer of fiction is bedeviled by the lack of meaning
in the universe. That is the dismaying problem his protagonist suffer
from: a total inability to discover a satisfying meaning for existence.
An End to Fury, a naturalistic first novel by Edward Mannix, describes
the struggle of a young Irish truck driver from Jersey City to break out
of the trap he finds himself in, to affirm the truth of his existence.
When he enters a Greenwich Village dive and meets some of "the
characters" there, his mind explodes in a raging denunciation of sophis-
ticated cynicism. He brushes it aside as the intellectualized commitment
of the weak. "Not to believe in anything isn't the same as faith in
Nothing." 14 There was no God and no hope for anyone in the world,
but that was not a death warrant. This knowledge of the meaningless-
ness of life was instinct with an almost mystical quality, for he
would go on living, even though he knew this to be true. There was
something to hope for - and that was hope itself. This redundancy of
hope constitutes his challenging answer to the wretched, snivelling
despair of "the beat generation." He has gone beyond the sterility of the
mind. "God and meaning were one and the same, and without one
there could not be the other." 15 All this is a prelude to the hero's ex-
hilarating awareness of his identity with all humanity, each human
personality being sacred and inviolable in his own right.
Striking as is this courageous attempt to transcend the fate of
meaninglessness, it fails to come off. A radical change has come over
the literary scene today. The outsider, the defiant rebel, is now a re-
cognizable type symbolizing what has happened to the spirit of man,
the terrible loss it has suffered. The "mystical" vision of the numinous
still emerges from time to time, as in A Death in the Family, but it
has, for the most part, now taken on a strange, satanic cast. What these
characters in the novels of Sartre, Camus, Paul Bowles, Beckett, and
others experience is not ecstasy but terror, not light but unrelieved
darkness, not the plenitude of God but the vacancy of Nothingness.
Their negation is bitter and often blasphemous. Their existential an-
guish, their spiritual crises, their sense of abandonment spring from
the terrifying knowledge that they are alone, that life is a useless pas-
sion, that reason is impotent to solve the riddle of existence, that their
14 Edward Mannix, An End to Fury. New York: The Dial Press, 1958, p. 430.
15 Ibid., p. 432.
pilgrimage on earth is but a journey to the end of night. Free but lost
in a universe of contingency, they behold a vision of the numinous that
culminates in a despairing paroxysm of realization that Nothingness is
God.
The surprising popularity of a religiously oriented novel like A
Death in the Family, which reaches down to elemental feelings and
gives voice to the vision of the universal, is perhaps a harbinger of a
revival that is about to come - a revival that will achieve a transcendent
synthesis which includes both the yes and the no, the light and the
darkness, the divine and the nothingness, of existence. When a novelist
endowed with this imaginative power finally makes his appearance,
he will, like Dostoevski, like Hawthorne, like Melville, recapture the
numinous vision in all its intractable contradictions of ecstasy and ter-
ror, seeking to reconcile faith and doubt, the inner and outer, spirit and
flesh, the diabolical and the divine, the sense of mystical blessedness and
cosmic harmony with existential dread. How this is to be achieved is no
longer a matter of aesthetic theory or metaphysical speculation. In ex-
ploring such high mysteries Dostoevski the novelist is a far better guide
than Heidegger the metaphysician. From the exploration of the nu-
minous in fiction we turn to a consideration of religion and the novel.
CHAPTER VIII
RELIGION AND THE NOVEL
1. THE DIALECTIC Of BELIEf AND EXPRESSIOl\;
The novelist is free to deal with any aspect of life's infinite variety
that happens to interest him: war and peace, the impact of Fascism on
peasant folk in a small Italian town, the outbreak of the plague, a
mutiny on board a vessel in the Pacific during the Second World War,
the wanderings and misfortunes of migratory workers during the years
of the depression, the romantic passion of love, the Strindbergian in-
ferno of marriage, the theme of homosexuality, the race problem in the
South, the conflicts of the business world and the difficult search for
integrity, prostitution, anti-Semitism, the fight against evil and cor-
ruption in politics, and what have you. He need not concern himself
with religion or the problem of God. Fundamentally, whatever his
ostensible theme, he is writing about people, their struggles, passions,
dreams, hopes, fears, frustrations, and moments of joy and fulfillment.
But in portraying these aspects of experience he discloses, if his vision is
sufficiently comprehensive and penetrating, the light thrown on human
striving and suffering by the fact of death. That dark light may break
through murkily by implication, as in the way the intertwined motifs
of disease and death enter into the composition of The Magic Mountain.
In crisis situations, the characters on the stage of fiction must pass
judgment, reveal the nature of their commitment, decide on the faith
which animates them, or Job-like maintain their ways before the Lord.
It is this universal craving, this hunger for transcendence, this complex
expression of ultimate concern, which marks the dialectical emergence
of "religious" feeling. Hence in the background of the human saga of
aspiration and failure, struggle and shipwreck, there is this fitful vision
of what lies behind the veil, the meaning of the mystery that baffles all
verbal formulation. The protagonist attempts to affirm the self or the
continuity of life beyond the darkness of annihilation that is death. The
Christian novelist will naturally seek to give his fiction an authentically
Christian solution, but how can he do so? We believe that he can do

so effectively in terms of the art he practices if he is steadily aware, and
makes the reader aware, of the formidable obstacles that stand in the
way of absolute faith, the rhythm of oscillation between the poles of
belief and unbelief.
In this study the primary objective has been not to examine religion
in relation to modern literature but modern literature in relation to
religion, especially to analyze and evaluate the traumatic impact of the
death of God on the creative mind That is the principal aim of this
investigation: to find out the specific ways in which twentieth-century
literature, with its roots in the nineteenth century, reveals all the
snarled implications of the religious struggle in our time. Whereas the
question of what religious faith, if it is genuinely held, can do for the
writer is germane to the subject under discussion, the more important
and relevant question in this context is how literature actually makes
use, negatively or positively, of the religious synthesis.
The underlying interconnection between literature and religion are,
as we have seen, abundantly present, though not in a doctrinaire sense.
The writer tries to draw a picture of life in all its mysterious complexity.
In his fictional cosmos he shadows forth, as James Agee does in A
Death in the Family, the need on the part of his characters to live in
the light of the conception they have formulated, however dimly, of the
meaning of existence, the ultimate purpose of the life they lead. The
author does not speak in his own person, but his basic themes, his re-
current patterns of preoccupation, his cluster of imagery and symbols
designed to suggest the numinous element, his strategy of selectivity
and emphasis as he mirrors the fortunes of his major characters and the
nature of their search, the prayers or the blasphemies that rise spontane-
ously to their lips in the hour of tragic crisis when disaster strikes or
death deprives them of all they hold dear - all this does come through.
Whereas it is clear that Faulkner in his early novels, for example, in
The Sound and the Fury, discerns no transcendent pattern of meaning
in the universe, Graham Greene, like Fran~ois Mauriac, creates his
fiction, however heretically, within a framework of Catholic doctrine
and belief.
But the modern novelist, whatever his religious persuasion, labors
under a grievous handicap. He must compose his work in an age of
rampant skepticism, moral confusion, crisis, and catastrophe. It is this
atmosphere of crisis that the novelists of the twentieth century are com-
pelled to breathe. To be sure, no age is without its internecine conflicts,
RELIGION AND THE NOVEL 113
its oppressive burdens of anxiety and anguish. What differentiates one

age from another, as social historians view the past in sober perspective,
is the way its leading spokesmen envisage their role and portray the
inner dynamism of their culture, the conception they entertain of their
place on earth. Each age believes in and affirms that truth which best
seems to satisfy its intellectual and spiritual demands. This creative
embodied "truth," which is not logically wrought, represents a meta-
physical utterance which is largely unconscious in its motivation, an
existential choice, even though it speaks in the name of reason and
offers the warranty of authentic "facts."
Yet modern writers reject the insidious notion that their beliefs are
but time-conditioned responses to subconscious needs. For them the
vision of doom they now behold is real. They distrust the fatal seduction
of principles, the siren music of world-shaking abstractions, the al-
lurements of the Absolute. Instead they are determined to trust only
their personal experiences and some give themselves to the mystique
of action. What a man does offers a vital clue to what he is, even
though action itself is intractably complex. Malraux, for example, was
one of the first modern novelists to perceive that the intelligence must
not abdicate its function by vainly searching for final solutions. Non-
Christian in his outlook, he challenged the bland nineteenth-century
assumption that there is anything sacred in life. There is no ultimate
goal of paradisal felicity to be achieved. The present is all in all. And if
life winds up in the shattering vision of the absurd, that is because of
the inescapable fatality of death.
Malraux sloughs off not only the divine principle but also the
absolutism of reason, even though he is no devotee of the irrational.
Man must create his own purpose. Intensity thus becomes the only
criterion of ontological value. That is the only way to revolt against the
tyranny of the absurd. Each one must choose his life even though his
efforts may fail and his achievements prove to be altogether useless.
Each one, in short, must learn to live without relying on the myth of
redemption. Each man is alone now, the dialogue between man and
God is ended. That is the tragedy of alienation set forth in Man's Fate.
But in every modern novelist who harbors the deadly secret of the
absurd, there is, we contend, the countervailing impulse to transcend it,
to rise above the fate of victimization, to defeat the forces that threaten
to devour the cosmos. He attempts to make use of the myth of the
absurd by insisting that absurdity is the indispensable condition of free-
dom. Life is made meaningful precisely because man knows that death
will come in the fullness of time or perhaps the next moment. No

justification can be found outside of history for the brief upsurge of
consciousness that makes a life, but it is all a man has. It is nothing and
it is everything. Man must not wear himself out in the futile effort to
discover an absolute meaning.
All this marks the emergence of a disturbingly new conception of
human nature in the art of fiction, as we pointed out in our analysis of
the alienated self. Whereas the Christian thinkers took it for granted
that man was created by God, Sartre, in Being and Nothingness and in
his plays and novels, asserts that man creates himself. Everything in
Sartre's writings is relativized. There is no fixed point of vision or
valuation. The universe, in his novels, is not seen from some vantage
point of the absolute but from the limitations inherent in a given
situation. Eliminating the theological or Biblical determination of what
is good and what is evil, he introduces a new frightening element into
the equation of existence. The individual is responsible to himself alone.
The hypothesis of faith is no longer needed in Sartre's phenomenologi-
cal ontology. Like Malraux, he insists that the quest for the impossible
must be abandoned. Neither saint nor devil, the rebellious hero of
modern Existentialist fiction rejects God while he reaches out for a life
that is truly authentic.
Today the novelist is struggling hard to present spiritual values that
can lead to a reaffirmation of faith in life, but the perils of such a quest
are manifold. Like Dostoevski, the father of the "religious" novel, he
must display the shape of belief in dialectical terms, "the invigorating
play of opposites." 1 The tensions, the dynamic conflicts, the tug-of-war
between good and evil, darkness and light, the human and the divine,
the sacred and the profane, Eros and Agape, must be heightened rather
than abolished by a leap of transcendence. Alyosha must be balanced by
Ivan, God by the Devil, in a Manichaean counterpoint of affirmation
and denial. The divine element can be imaginatively projected in fiction,
as in drama, only in relation to the refractory stuff of the imperfectly
human.
This holds true even of the devout Catholic novelist. Whatever theo-
logical obsessions may rule his creative imagination, he is interested in
the problem of evil and sin as well as in the problem of salvation. His
task is not merely to state that the two problems are one but to re-
present the relationship dramatically. The temptation he may fall into
1 R. W. B. Lewis, The Picaresque Saint. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1959,
p. 214.
as a novelist is to dwell overmuch on the temptation of sin - and

what is more sinful than unbridled sensuality? - and then seek to annul
the effect by a tour de force of conversion at the end. Mauriac does
exactly that in Therese, employing religious symbols in order to
heighten the calculated shock of sensuality. When he was asked if his
Christian faith had helped or hindered him in his work, he answered:
both. It had enriched him but it also held him back: he could not let
himself go. Then he adds cryptically: "Today I know that God pays no
attention to what we write; He uses it." 2
Mauriac, like Bernanos and Graham Greene, is interested not in
people who are saintly and righteous; they have no story for him to tell,
but he knows "the secrets of the hearts that are deep buried in, and
mingled with, the filth of the flesh." 3 The phrase hits us hard: "the
filth of the flesh." It is this "filth," according to Mauriac, which causes
people to rail at God. They will brook no denial of their animal
instincts. Therese does not find the peace of God at the end. The author
confesses that he wanted her ending to be Christian in character, but it
did not come out as he had intended. He had, in fact, written such an
ending but he destroyed the manuscript. Why? "I could not see the
priest who would have possessed the qualifications necessary if he was
to hear her confession with understanding." 4
This is exactly right. The power of this novel lies not in its pervading
religiosity of spirit but in its penetrating analysis of the complexities
and perversities of love. When Therese is faced with terror, she feels a
mad prayer rise to her lips "from the dark abyss of nothingness in
which her spirit lay crushed." 5 Thus we get in this novel a curious
blend of corruption and the cross (though even the cross is sexualized),
sin and redemption. There is, then, no such entity as a theologically
orthodox or religiously pure novel. Catholic writers differ widely in
their interpretation of the cross; they respond in diverse ways to the
modern world of atheism and corruption. The identifying mark of the
Catholic creative vision is this fixation on the drama of the Crucifixion,
as integral to the working out of the pattern of life on earth. Like
Mauriac, Georges Bernanos is obsessed with the theme of evil, his
vision of the world steeped in carnality and infected with vice.
2 Malcolm Cowley (ed.), Writers at Work. New York: The Viking Press, 1958,
p. 49.
3 Fran~ois Mauriac, Therese. Translated by Gerard Hopkins. New York, Henry Holt
and Company, 1947, p. 4.
4 Ibid., p. 190.
5 I bid., p. 321.
These two brief examples perhaps suffice to suggest the enormous

complexity of the problem the Christian novelist must face. It is not
only his subject matter that bedevils him; he suffers from internal
contradictions as welL On the one hand, there is his pure artistic per-
ception, untrammeled and compelling, and on the other he is bound by
his obligation as a Christian to interpret life in the light of his faith. He
cannot organize the material of fiction from a purely aesthetic per-
specitve, and yet this is precisely what he is required to do as a profes-
sional novelist. Like Bernanos and Mauriac and Graham Greene, he
is too often drawn to themes that are an offence and a stumbling block
to his religious sensibility, but if he is to keep faith with his art he
must paint things as they are, life in all its variousness, imperfections,
and evils.
What, then, is the solution? In the end he betrays himself, as every
writer must, in what he produces. If he is a Catholic, he gives himself
away by his quality of vision, the force and angle of his insight. As
Antonia White declares writing on 'The Novelist": "'It is not a
question of 'dragging' religion into his work, or even of deliberately
pushing it out. It is simply there} part of his preoccupation, part of his
vision; and part, only too likely, of his deepest private conflicts." 6
There is the painful difficulty the Christian writer struggles with, the
possibility that he may betray his weaknesses and distort his vision and
his values in the process of communication. For he writes in an age
when the supernatural has been discredited and his inner conflicts may
therefore lead him astray. He is addressing an audience which no longer
shares his stock of sacred symbols.
What is important in the creative relationship between belief and
expression is not the religious faith the novelist cherishes but how he
sees and responds to the world of experience, how his writing is suf-
fused by the sense of the numinous, how this apprehension of what lies
beyond the scope of sense and intelligence is shaped into form. Spe-
cifically, his religious sensibility must not inhibit his efforts to present
an honest and uncensored version of the world of man. Though he is a
Catholic, Graham Greene, as we shall see in the next chapter, is aware
of the frustrations and dangers that attend the religious quest. He uses
the material of Catholicism - that is to say, he deals with conflicts of
conscience, the struggle between spirit and sense, God and Caesar, in
the minds and hearts of believers, but the anguish of conflict goes far
6 John M. Todd (ed.), The Arts, Artists and Thinkers. London and New York;
Longmans, Green, 1958, p. 115,
beyond the dogmatic content of any faith. That is so because Greene

had the creative courage to confront the overriding horror of evil, and
if he sounds the motif of faith triumphant he invariably brings into
play the opposing dialectic of doubt. He pictures hell with greater
imaginative vividness of conviction than he does the attractions of
heaven; he never forgets that his characters are all-too-human creatures
of appetite and instinct, driven by biological urgencies they cannot con-
trol, but even in their worst ordeals of temptation and despair he sug-
gests that God is concerned about them. The point is simply that
Greene, though a Catholic, writes primarily as a novelist.
2. THE SEC U 1 A R NOV Ell S TAN D THE

RELIGIOUS PROBLEM
Whereas for the Christian writer the answers are, presumably, al-
ready given, the secular novelist starts with a host of concretely human,
existential questions for which he realizes there are no answers. His
portrayal of the human predicament may, as in the novels of Malraux
or Sartre, offer no glimmer of hope, no possibility of appeal to God.
While the work of such men as Joyce, Kafka, Sartre, Camus, Heming-
way, D. H. Lawrence, and Faulkner may be legitimately studied from
the religious point of view as exemplifying the desperateness of modern
man's plight, their novels do not conform to any Christian eschatology.
On the whole, modern literature illustrates not the presence but the
absence of God, not the triumph but the defeat of faith. The most
sensitive and gifted writers of our time are for better of worse outside
the religious pale, largely indifferent to the doctrinal message of
Christianity. Like Nietzsche, they choose the aesthetic in preference to
the religious perspective.
In his essay on "The Novel," D. H. Lawrence does not deny that
fiction is informed with a "purpose" and a "philosophy," but it does
not exist for the express object of saving the world or the soul of man.
Lawrence rejects the pieties that are contained in Tolstoy's Resurrec-
tion. What he looks for in fiction is the passional inspiration, the felt
life, not the religious or moral message. What is God but the sum and
substance of all that is quick; the novel cannot remain alive without the
presence of this vital element. It contains no didactic "absolute." 7
Lawrence would damn all absolutes. All goals are relative.
In The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence tries to give expression to the
7 The Later D. H. Lawrence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952, p. 194.
need for man at this nadir-point of negation to make a clean start. Don
Ramon, aided by Cipriano and his faithful army, sets out to liberate
his country from the lie of Christianity and to usher in the Mexican
savior. When the Roman Catholic priests rouse the mob to resist this
fascist movement, Cipriano uses his forces to defeat them, and the
Church is expropriated. The religious renaissance is to be effected by
establishing a radically new cult of Nature-worship. Lawrence, like
Nietzsche, is attacking the effete myth of Christianity. How thin and
bloodless are Jehovah and Christ compared to these old chthonic gods
of the Mexican people. Ramon tells the American heroine Kate: "Ah, it
is time now for Jesus to go back to the place of the death of the gods,
and take the long bath of being made young again." 8 The movement
to unseat Christianity in Mexico gains momentum. The Mexicans,
Lawrence delcares, do not know Jesus as a Savior, the dead god in
their tomb. Now they are led to believe that Christ is leaving Mexico
and Quetzalcoatl is coming. The Plumed Serpent helps in part to
explain the meaning of T. S. Eliot's remark: "The religion which
Lawrence would have liked to achieve is a religion of power and magic,
of control rather than propitiation." 9
By the time he was sixteen, Lawrence had already dropped the
Christian dogma and ceased worrying about Heaven or salvation. Hea-
ven was but a collective dream of the race of man. As for saving his
soul, this he could not comprehend, for the soul was only to be lived,
not saved. If Lawrence is fundamentally "religious" in his feverish
search for myth and meaning, his conception of Christianity is shock-
ingly heretical. It is Christ as the symbol of the fullness and fruitfulness
of life whom he hails. At the time Lawrence was writing his books, the
new generation, he declares, were repudiating a religion born in the
tomb.
By the time the young C:1me on the stage, Calvary was empty, the tombs were closed,
the women had lost forever the Christ-child and the virgin saviour, and it was
altogether the day after, cold, bleak, empty, blank, meaningless, almost siIly.lO
The Church, Lawrence goes on to say, preached the old ghastly creed
of Christ crucified, but this was not true of the spirit of man. It is the
Resurrection that brings out the full meaning and power of the Pas-
sion. It is the mystery of Christ risen in the flesh that is in keeping with
8 D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent. New York: Vintage Books, 1955, p. 65.
9 Father William Tiverton, D. H. Lawrence and Human Existence. London:
Rackliff, 1951, p. 115.
10 The Later D. H. Lawrence, p. 388.
human experience. That is how Lawrence daringly transvalues the

Christian myth, and it is this transvaluation that makes up the theme
of The Man Who Died.
With the publication of this novel Lawrence was denounced as the
enemy of God. That is not surprising. By writing his story he actually
hoped to revitalize Christianity that had grown moribund. With great
tenderness and compassion he describes the return of Christ from
death, the first faint stirring in him of the awakening pulse of life as
he beholds around him a world that had never died. The savior is dead
in him; he is utterly disillusioned, and can now take up the task of
life itself. He has not risen; his faith in the otherworld has perished. It
is the priestess of Isis who brings him back to life, back to the glory
of the flesh, the resurrection of sexual union, the Christ truly risen.
The fiction of the past three decades has gone far beyond Lawrence
in its repudiation of the Christian mythos. One critic complains that
what modern literature has lost which would have made it vital and
wholesome is faith in God. This is the first generation of novelists
working, "in many instances, quite unconsciously, on the tacit or
declared premise that there is no God.... " 11 It is difficult to see how the
restoration of faith in God can help to improve the quality of modern
fiction. Is Graham Greene a superior writer to D. H. Lawrence simply
because he believes in God? Is faith in itself a source of vision and a
guarantee of creative power? If, as George Orwell consistently held, the
writer must be free to voice the truth as he sees it, then he can give no
allegiance to Church or Party. Nor can religion, after all, be the pro-
duct of a deliberate act of will.
In his early work Faulkner explored the domain of the diabolical,
the conflict between aspiration and failure, picturing a world that is
sustained by no supreme power or purpose. Only in his later period, in
A Fable, that confused and despairing parable of the coming of Christ
in the First World War, did he seek to find a symbolic equivalent for
the passion in man to become one with God. But such novels as
Sanctuary, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Light in
August portray a world that is remote from the framework of Christian
values. Now, returning to his spiritual roots, Faulkner is seeking to
affirm life, but there is no evidence in his writing that he has under-
gone a "religious" conversion. It is twisting the meaning of his work
11 Edmund Fuller. Man in Modern Fiction. New York; Random House, 1958, p. 8.
to regard him as essentially Christian in his reading of life, the fictional

interpreter of the dogma of original sin, as Randall Stewart does. 12
Nothing could be further from the truth. Faulkner is neither Chris-
tian nor anti-Christian. An artist in prose, a fabulist, he is preeminently
a writer of tragic fiction. He does not, in his creations, commit himself
on ultimate issues, nor is he to be identified with any of his multitudi-
nous characters. In The Sound and the Fury, he is not only Dilsey,
the humane, perfectly "normal," and decent person who believes in
God, but also Benjy the idiot, Quentin the lost suicidal soul, the promis-
cuous Caddy, and the nihilist father; he is present in all of them, just as
Dostoevski is present in all the Karamazovs. Faulkner is at one with
Hightower and Joe Christmas, with Quentin and Jason and Snopes,
with Popeye and Temple Drake, and with the Corporal who plays the
role of Christ in A Fable and his earthly father.
In A Fable, Faulkner introduces the myth of Christ arisen. A re-
giment in the First World War in a sector on the Western front has
defected because of the activities of twelve men led by their corporal,
a foul-mouthed, profane, morose, almost inarticulate man, formerly a
jockey. In this rambling, symbolically overladen tale, Faulkner is bent
on writing a modern version of Christ, despised, hated, persecuted,
betrayed and "crucified." A mystery surrounds this "arch-criminal" who
preaches the gospel of peace; he is killed in action on various fronts,
and yet he remains alive. But his "death" in the end bears witness to no
miracle. It is the General who believes in man, his ability to endure and
prevail.
Faulkner can be viewed from a multiplicity of perspectives, each of
which could be cogently supported by references to his novels: the
perspective of psychopathology, life as a madhouse, a thing of sound
and fury, a phantasmagoria enacted on a doomed radioactive planet
against the background of nothingness. A writer does not affirm faith
or the anguish of unfaith; he reveals life, the life of people who are,
like Dilsey, the bearers of faith or who, like Addie in As I Lay Dying,
suffer from lack of it. Faulkner, like all writers of tragedy, holds in
balance the vision of darkness and light, disclosing the paradoxical and
questionable aspects of existence. It is obvious that, having been
brought up in a Christian community in the South, he will introduce
characters who embody Christian values, but on what grounds is
Faulkner to be identified with them? If he brings in images of Christ,
12 Randall Stewart, America1z Literature and the Christian Doct1·ine. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1958, pp. 141-142.
he also utilizes images of the perverse and the dark and the demonic in
life.
The chief ground for the recent emphasis on Faulkner's Christianity
the critics find in his attitude toward evil, his delineation of man as "a
fallen creature." Waggoner asserts that the Faulknerian universe is one
"in which sin and suffering, redemption and damnation, are the really
decisive categories." 13 But that would be more or less true of any fic-
tional universe that is sufficiently comprehensive and profound, es-
pecially if the decisive categories are flexibly defined. Waggoner is
closer home when he makes the point that "in Faulkner's work the
Crucifixion is central and paradigmatic and the Resurrection might
never have occurred." 14 Faulkner's tragic vision holds Out no hope
of redemption, only the assurance of shipwreck and the finality of
despair that is to be endured with indomitable courage.
The Christian is aware of the mystery that transcends the time-bound
struggles and suffering of finite man, but he is also aware that the
mystery is now situated in the context of a world in which religious
beliefs have fallen apart. The work of the Christian novelist is riddled
with conflict because he knows that his audience for the most part does
not share his body of beliefs. Conflicts of this kind stand Out conspi-
cuously in the work of a gifted and complex Catholic novelist like
Graham Greent'.
13 Nathan A. Scott, Jr. (ed.), The Tragic Visioll alld the Christiall Faith. New
York: Association Press, 1957, p. 318.
14 I bid., p. 319.
CHAPTER IX
CATHOLICISM IN FICTION
Inevitably, in dealing with the work of a Catholic novelist, the critic,

whether he likes it or not, is compelled to touch upon theological issues,
for the simple reason that they playas a rule so prominent a role in the
writings of the author he is discussing. Perhaps in the end the critic's
approach serves a salutary purpose in that it helps to throw some light
on the vexed problem of the relationship that obtains, or should
obtain, between the novel and religion. Today this problem must be
viewed, as we have shown, from a radically changed perspective. It
was not Nietzsche but Darwin who hastened the death of God. The
publication of The Origin of SPecies in 1859 dealt Christianiry a mortal
blow. In short, after its appearance, the attitude of the writer toward
the supernatural was transformed; he lost his old instinctive sureness of
faith in the absolute and eterniry. Henceforth man could no longer be
regarded as a special creation, made in the image of God, but as a part
of Nature, red in tooth and claw, subject to the reign of unalterable
law. However, despite the subsidence of faith in Christianiry, the
Christian outlook is still a dynamic part of Western civilization.
But can the modern writer, even if he is a believer, subscribe to
Christianiry on the old terms? Can he believe without falling into
heresy? Can the creative imagination accommodate itself to the ortho-
doxies of the Christian faith? Independent and therefore heretical in its
vision of life, the creative mind abhors dogma. If the writer is to derive
any nourishment from the Christian mythos, he can find it only in the
endless struggle with sin and the temptation to challenge orthodox
religious doctrine. That is, in effect, the solution Graham Greene seems
to have accepted. In his contribution to the book, Why Do I Write?, he
declares that the practicing novelist, whatever his credal commitment,
identifies himself with all of mankind, the guilry as well as the inno-
cent, though Greene is by temperament drawn more closely to the
CATHOLICISM IN FICTION 123
portrayal of the guilty. But no one, and that is the point he stresses in
his aesthetics of fiction, should be shut out from the all-embracing com-
passion of the novelist. If this plunges him in the mire of heresy, that is
unavoidable. It is his function, nay, his duty, to be disloyal. This is the
paradoxical but courageous faith, born of despair, which animates
Greene's world of fiction.
Greene is a fascinatingly complex novelist, in his "entertainments" as
well as his professedly serious fiction. Everything he writes is informed
with his passionately felt vision of life. He is too good a novelist to
preach directly; the characters, even when they come from the under-
world of crime, are tormented by feelings of guilt, overwhelmed by a
frightening sense of the emptiness of existence.
Greene was not born into the Catholic faith. He did not become
converted until February 1926, when he was twenty-two years old. He
has never made clear what spiritual crisis he passed through which led
him to take this fateful step. For a long time, as he tells us in an auto-
biographical essay in The Lost Childhood and Other Essays, he had
been haunted by thoughts of death and actually experimented with
suicide by playing Russian routlette with a revolver. He possessed an
intense awareness of the contradictions of existence, the meaningless-
ness of fame, and the certainty of failure. The world of the senses was
a snare and a delusion. For a youth thus inwardly in turmoil, spiritually
cast adrift, not knowing what to do with his life, Catholicism offered a
firm foundation of faith. In his book describing his travels in Africa,
Journey without Maps, he declares: "I had not been converted to a
religious faith. I had been convinced by specific arguments in the
probability of its creed." 1 In his use of the religious theme in fiction he
reveals that it contains much which horrifies him. Was not the rite of
the Eucharist essentially cannibalistic?
If character is destiny, then Greene's somber view of the world and
of the nature of man has been shaped decisively by his temperament.
The fact that as a Catholic he holds a number of religious and moral
values tells us little about the specific content and quality of his work.
Consider such "Catholic" writers as James Joyce, Sean O'Faolain, Fran-
<;ois Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, and Graham Greene. These men have
nothing but their religion in common, and in reality not even that, for
they interpret it and react to it in strikingly different ways. Graham
Greene adopts a consistently pessimistic and tragic view of life. In The
Lost Childhood and Other Essays, he makes clear his conviction that
1 John Atkins, Graham Greene. London: John Calder, 1957, p. 68.
failure attends all our projects and that in the end, in this world, we
suffer shipwreck. This brooding pessimistic outlook is not only native
to his temperament but fits in logically with his belief in the reality of
hell and damnation as well as the reality of evil. And what is his
primary source of interest as a novelist but this sense of evil, which is
so ingenious in putting on disguises and finding lodgment in the human
heart. He is literally obsessed (he is convinced that every writer suffers
from his own type of obsession) by the theme of betrayal: Judas be-
traying Christ is the paradigm of every betrayal enacted on earth - wife
by husband, friend by friend, the leader by his people. Though he does
not pretend to solve the mystery of free will, Greene knows that every
thought and every act commits us ineluctably; we choose our own death
and are responsible for our own life.
These themes of choice, of commitment (conditioned, who can say,
by what crucial incident of childhood), of betrayal, enter intimately into
the fabric of his fiction, for they are integral parts of his vision of
human reality. All his life long, as he tells us, he has been fascinated
by the problem of evil, which is an impenetrable mystery. Thus early
did Greene discover his major themes: the universality of evil, the seed
of failure that is implanted in the heart of success, the sense of doom
that rules this earth and the miserable creatures called men crawling on
its surface. From the perspective of the art of fiction, of course, the
important thing is not that he is obsessed by these themes but what he
does with them, how he embodies them in his work. We shall see that
he leaves us in no doubt as to where his sympathies lie. Disregarding
the imperatives of orthodoxy, he introduces us to "heroes" who are
sinners and failures. Thus early he worked out the pattern which would
shape the religious motif in his fiction: "perfect evil walking the
world where perfect good can never walk again, and only the pen-
dulum ensures that after all in the end justice is done." 2
Indeed, it is largely in terms of his religious obsessions that he not
only interprets character and destiny but also evaluates literature. In
Henry James, for example, he finds a deep religious streak, a perception
that in the end everyone is punished in his own way, a belief in the
supernatural - a critical judgment that is hard to accept. But in his
essay on "The Lesson of the Master," Greene makes this revealing
statement about Henry James: "The novel by its nature is dramatic, but
2 Graham Greene. The Lost Childhood and Other Essays. New York: Viking. 1952.
p. 17.
it need not be melodramatic, and James's problem was to admit violen-

ce without becoming violent." 3
Here Greene raises an interesting and complex problem that has con-
siderable bearing on his own fiction, for it does become violent at times.
Yet how, Greene asks, can that be helped? Once the religious sense was
lost for the writer and the human being ceased to occupy a position of
central importance, the novel turned subjective, exploring the world
of sensations, dreams, memory, fantasy, but the vanished sense of
human importance could not be recovered by this shift of focus. Dis-
trusting the "pure" novel, Greene composed fiction that concerns itself
with the solid, sensuous world, but he also pictures the arena of struggle
between good and evil, the efforts of the soul to save itself from dam-
nation. And in heightening the religious conflict generated by perfect
evil walking the earth, Greene admits violence without, in his serious
novels, ever descending to melodrama.
Though Greene has carefully distinguished his "entertainments"
from his serious fiction, the distinction is not always clear and present.
Brighton Rock, originally published as an "entertainment," was later
included in the canon of his serious work, and rightly so, but it brings
up the problem, particularly acute in a writer like Greene, whether even
in his calculated fictional entertainments he can entirely keep out his
peculiar obsessions, his characteristic vision of the world. It is doubtful
if he can. In Brighton Rock, out of such melodramatic material as the
feuds of gangsterdom, with its planned murders and its killings for re-
venge, Greene weaves a story that far transcends the plane of melo-
drama. The two principal characters, the Boy who is the leader of a
gang, and the girl Rose who becomes involved in the action, are Catho-
lics. Both believe in sin and hell and damnation, but only Rose hopes
for the redemption of grace. It is the Boy, scarred for life by the wounds
of poverty, who is filled with dim religious longings, an overwhelming
sense of loneliness, a foreboding of what life in its inscrutable malice
might do to him. When he confides to Rose that he does not go to
Mass, she asks him imploringly whether he believes, whether he thinks
it is true.
"Of course it's true," the Boy said. "What else could there be?" he went scornfully
on. "Why," he said, "it's the only thing that fits. These atheists, they don't know
nothing. Of course there's Hell. Flames and damnation," he said with his eyes on the
dark shifting water and the lightning and the lamps going out above the black struts
of the Palace Pier, "torments."
3 Ibid., p. 49.
"And Heaven too," Rose said with anxiety, while the rain fell interminably on.
"Oh, maybe," the Boy said, "maybe." 4
Now this brief scene, played out against the backdrop of the sea, the
lightning, and the driving rain, illustrates not only the ambiguities with
which Greene freights his dialogue but also the manner in which he
incorporates his religious insights into the body of fiction. The Boy,
knowing himself to be a wicked, unregenerate sinner, feels that Hell is
certain, but there is no guarantee of Heaven. Greene leaves us in no
doubt on that score. Hell lay about this youngster in his infancy, Greene
declares, and that is why he believes in flames and damnation and
torments.
The tragedy in Brighton Rock draws to its appointed close: the Boy
must die, but he cannot take the leap into eternity without facing the
consequences of his action; he is convinced, however, that peace is not
for him. "Heaven was but a word; Hell was something he could trust."5
Here emerges the heart of the mystery: even for the most hardened sin-
ner there is the promise of God's everlasting mercy. Rose, with her
unswerving loyalty, would rather be damned with the Boy than be
saved - alone. All that deterred her from taking the final step and
committing suicide was the fear that they might miss each other in the
land of death, one being granted mercy which the other was denied. But
this is the veritable sign of her grace: in refusing to be saved without
the Boy she reveals her saintliness. The old priest to whom she goes
for confession assures her that no soul is cut off from mercy. Then he
tells her the message that is the theme of the novel: A Catholic, he says,
"is more capable of evil than anyone. I think perhaps - because we be-
lieve in him - we are more in touch with the devil than other people." 6
Though Greene is too expert a craftsman to scamp the work of moti-
vating the action, the theological preoccupations of the protagonists are
not effectively integrated within the body of the story proper. Yet,
regardless of what these characters may feel about heaven and hell, the
spirit of sacrifice that Rose exhibits seems to indicate that saintliness
consists, after all, in human fidelity. Whatever may happen beyond the
grave, on this side we must keep faith and, however sinful our lives
may be, love is the freely offered means, available to all, of saving us.
One need embrace no Catholic theodicy to cry amen to this all-too-
human doctrine.
4 Graham Greene, Brighton Rock. New York: The Viking Press, 1938, p. 72.
S Ibid., p. 331.
6 Ibid., p. 357.
In The Power and the Glory (first published as The Labyrinthine

Ways), Greene shows what he can do in composing a fascinating novel
of suspense about a Catholic priest who struggles against temptation
and who is destined to suffer the fate of martyrdom. Held throughout
by the compelling power of the narrative, the reader not only beholds
how the essence of the faith, despite all the cruel vicissitudes of persecu-
tion, is vindicated but also gains insight into the contradictory nature
of the believer who, besieged by the secular hosts of evil, is forced to
deny his God. Yet Greene, in this novel, it not guilty of the charge
of writing religious propaganda. The Power and the Glory performs
its ministry as an imaginative work of art.
For it is not enough to say of Greene's principal characters that they
are Catholics; they are religious with a defiant and often disconcerting
difference. Though they remain true to the religious spirit, they are in
many respects wretched heretics, grievous offenders against the express
commandments of the Church. In The Power and the Glory, the priest
who carries out in secret the sacred duties enjoined upon him by God
and the Church, though all religious observances are stricdy forbidden
in this province of Mexico, is far from being an admirable character. A
whisky priest who gets drunk at times, he has been guilty of fornication
and has begotten an illegitimate daughter, but he is miserably aware of
his transgressions and serves God as faithfully as he can in the face of
brutal persecution, knowing what the penalty is to be if he is caught
and quiedy accepting this fate.
What adds density and the dramatic force of complexity to Greene's
story is his steadfast awareness of the power and pervasiveness of evil at
work in the world and in the soul of man. The faith is dialectically af-
firmed through a series of heresies and denials, trials and temptations.
Uncompromisingly honest in his portrayal of life, Greene knows the
worst that can be said about human beings, yet he still regards them as
made in the image of God. They commit abominations, their sins rise
up like a foul stench in the nostrils of God, they are vile and despicable
creatures, but they are also the children of the Lord and even in their
drunkenness and fornication and betrayal they bear witness to the
miracle of God's grace.
Greene writes with extraordinary sensory vividness; with a few deft
visual strokes he etches a scene, builds up the atmosphere of a place,
suggests the heat and indolence and poverty of this Mexican region
with its rank vegetation, its shabby buzzards, its swarming beedes. The
enemy of the poor hunted priest who must flee in disguise is a Mexican
lieutenant who is devoted fanatically to a secular religion of his own:

the extirpation of superstitious ignorance among his people, the fight
against the curse of poverty, the enlightenment of the masses. He has a
deep horror of the Christian myth and mysteries, the sacrifices the
Church demands of the credulous, benighted natives, the peasants
kneeling before holy images, mortifying their flesh, hoodwinked by
these lying promises of eternal bliss in the afterlife. Greene sees in him
something of the priest.
It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a
loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God
directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy - a complete
certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved
from animals for no purpose at all. He knew. 7
There at last we are given a dramatic projection of fundamental

values in conflict. Greene obviously does not agree with this lieutenant
and his dream of Socialism but he understands the motives that drive
him and he respects these motives even if he cannot share them. What
makes Greene so singularly effective as a religious novelist is that he
does not write religious novels; he writes novels that deal illuminating-
ly with an essential aspect of life that we call religious. He knows the
heart and hope of the unbeliever as well as the vital intuitions that
support the devout Catholic, and he knows, too, the devils of doubt that
at times sorely afflict the believer. For this fanatic of a lieutenant coolly
formulates the logic of the situation: if heaven was real, then no tor-
ments of the flesh should have prevented the Catholic priests in Mexi-
co from becoming martyrs of the faith. The crusading ideal in behalf
of which the lieutenant is prepared to massacre the clergy is to remove
all vestiges of superstition from the mind of the young generation and
fill them with the saving light of truth, the knowledge of "a vacant
universe and a cooling world, the right to be happy in any way they
chose." 8
In his flight, the priest, though aware of his inadequacies, keeps on
doing what has to be done. Worthy as he is of being damned for his
sins, why had God chosen him to put God into the mouths of men? To
the very last he retains the sense of the wonder of life, a feeling of
reverence for the unique privilege of being alive. He has the opportuni-
ty to escape from the trap and begin life all over again in blessed free-
7 Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory. New York: The Viking Press, 1951,
p. 33.
8 Ibid., p. 77.
dom, but if he left these people then God would cease to exist for them.
Unlike the lieutenant, he knows how limited man is, how restricted in
his repertory of vices. Was it not for such people that Christ had died?
For what is God? How picture Him to the intelligence of simple folk?
No matter what explanation he might give his parishioners, he himself
felt at the heart of his faith the presence of this mystery - that man was
made in the image of God. "God was the parent, but He was also the
policeman, the priest, the maniac, and the judge. Something resembling
God dangled from the gibbet or went into odd attitudes before the
bullets in the prison yard or contorted itself like a camel in the attitude
of sex." 9 Hence the need not only for infinite understanding but also
infinite compassion.
The most moving scene in the novel takes place in a crowded cell, in
which all types of men - the criminal, the young and the old, the pious
and the bestial - are thrown together. Feeling a tremendous love for
these inmates of the prison, even the worst of them, the priest discloses
his identity. Even in this desperate situation, he maintains the integrity
of his faith and resolves to do God's bidding. Everything that lives is
holy, and understanding drives out hatred. And the prisoners do not
betray him. When he is finally caught, he realizes that death ends all,
but he knows too that his trespasses matter but little; he is an instru-
ment of God, who remains a mystery.
Graham Greene's work illustrates the fact that there is no such
thing as a "religious" (or for that matter a "political") novel. The
subject matter of fiction does not matter in the least. What counts is
what the novelist does with it. Proust is a "political" novelist, though
he does not concern himself overtly with politics. D. H. Lawrence, for
example, is one of our truly "religious" novelists, even though he
does not deal with religion in the orthodox sense of the term. Fiction
inevitably portrays the existential conflicts of human beings, the crises
of destiny they must face, the struggles they pass through and the suf-
fering they endure, the image of perfection they pursue. If the novelist
happens to be a Catholic, that will naturally color his interpretation of
character and his vision of life, but the religious atmosphere that
pervades his work is only that - atmosphere and background. The
religious synthesis cannot dictate the outcome except in one respect: if
the leading characters are Catholics, we thereby gain some insight into
their probable reactions in various crucial situations, though even there
the resolution of the central conflict must remain in doubt to the very
9 Ibid., p. 336.
l30 THE SEARCH FOR GOD
end. That is to say, if the novel is to retain its underlying dramatic

power, if it is to give a faithful and dynamic portrait of the dilemmas
of the human situation, it must focus attention on the contradictions
of human nature, its irrational impulses, the effort of people to live up
to their faith, their difficulties in carrying out the commandments of
God. Otherwise the novel turns into a religious tract in which the dog-
ma is theologically sound but artistically useless.
If the novelist chooses - he is free, as we have said, to write about the
kind of life he knows best - to analyze the conflicts of Catholics, then
in one sense his fictional pattern has already been chosen for him. The
characters in his novels must be punished - they must punish them-
selves - for their transgressions. Hence the Catholic novel (if such a
term is permissible) presents basically a drama of sin and redemption,
a plot that revolves around the twin poles of guilt and atonement. Such
is the perversity of human nature, however, that readers of fiction are
generally more interested in the commission of sin than in the process
of redemption. Hence the novelist must build up the structure of sin in
such an imaginatively convincing manner that we can identify ourselves
with the suffering sinner even as we anticipate the price he must pay
for his enormities, the accounting he must give for his transgressions
before his conscience and before God.
This narrative action must not be too schematized if the novel is
not to sacrifice psychological complexity in the interests of orthodoxy.
Human beings, especially men and women in love, cannot be fitted
into the Procrustean frame of dogma. Graham Greene, a gifted novel-
ist and conscientious artist, highlights these perversities of the human
soul. For him, as we have seen, it is the sinner who best exemplifies the
cardinal Christian virtues and comes closest to being a saint. In The
Heart of the Matter, Greene describes with extraordinary insight the
diabolical rationalizations of which the mind is capable and the despair
that often overtakes human relationships. The action takes place in a
forsaken spot of West Africa where the English officials, leading dreary
and monotonous lives, are sick of their work with Negroes. Brilliantly
Greene paints the background, the vultures, the dirt, the heat, the
gossip that spreads with insidious swiftness, the meanness and moral
rottenness of the community. Scobie, the hero of this tale, who has been
in this region for fifteen years, is a man of scrupulous integrity, incapa-
ble of lying to himself.
In the course of his duties as a deputy commissioner, he has dis-
covered that guilt and innocence are relative, not absolute. Scobie has
gone beyond the relief of tears, beyond the reach of illusion, beyond
tragedy. Sternly he lives with his own exacting conscience, bearing his
lot with stoical fortitude. All he craves is the blessing of peace, but that
is not to be bought. He has disciplined himself not to let emotion get
the better of him, for in this climate it is dangerous to yield to love or
hate. Greene balances the portrait by showing that even though men
may sink to the level of beasts, perjure themselves, accept bribes, yield
to corruption, some refuse to sell their souls, and Scobie is such a man,
prepared in advance to accept the consequences of his wrong actions,
knowing he will have to pay in full for his defiance of God's mandate
against self-slaughter. He is the sinner of whom saints are made.
It is for the sake of his wife, whom he no longer loves but for whom
he feels boundless pity, that he finally strikes a bargain which proves
his undoing. The seed of corruption enters into him. He entertains no
illusions about life, which is much too long, an eternity of torment.
Though bottled up within himself, disinclined to reveal his most in-
timate feelings, he cannot endure to live in deception and darkness
when the truth glares at him unmistakably; but unfortunately the truth
is more than human beings can bear; more important than truth is the
act of kindness implicit in the lie. Out of pity for his poor wife, Scobie
is prepared to traffic with evil. He realizes that the despair he carries
within him is the unforgivable sin, but it is one which the evil man
never practices. "Only the man of good will carries always in his heart
this capacity for damnation." 10
The conflict in the novel comes to a head when Scobie's wife leaves
and Scobie falls in love with Helen. As a Catholic he tries to pray but
it is only a formality, for he does not consider that his life is sufficiently
important for him to importune God with his prayers. Greene makes
the religious element psychologically and dramatically convincing by
indicating that there were times when Scobie found it difficult to ex-
plain the mystery of God's action, to reconcile the seeming cruelties of
God with His divine love. There were no happy people in the world -
a constantly recurring theme in Greene's fiction. It was absurd to expect
happiness as one's portion in life. What then was the truth? Scobie
wonders: "If one knew ... the facts, would he have to feel pity even for
the planets? if one reached what they call the heart of the matter?" 11
That is indeed the heart of the matter, the question of questions, the
10 Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter. New York: The Viking Press, 1948,
p. 61.
11 I bid., p. 128.
enigma that can plague the mind of a naturalist like Thomas Hardy as
well as a Catholic novelist like Greene. If one knew... the facts. All
Scobie is certain of is this: the inevitability of suffering. He has tried to
love God, but "I'm not sure that I even believe." 12 The priest to whom
he confesses this is not at all put out. But the absolution affords Scobie
no sense of relief. God seemed somehow too accessible.
The situation is complicated by the fact that the woman he loves
unlawfully does not believe in God. When the affair reaches its cul-
mination, he recklessly sends her the note of love which compromises
him - the note in which he blasphemously declares that he loves her
more than he loves God. By this one act he has abandoned God. Now,
though he still yearns hungrily for peace, he finds he cannot pray. His
wife is on her way back and he must choose. Believing as he does in the
reality of everlasting damnation, in hell as "a permanent sense of
loss," 13 he chooses. Logical in her reasoning, the woman he loves forces
him to face the contradictions in his behavior: if he believes in hell,
why does he continue this illicit relationship? What is his answer?
Despite the categorical teaching of the Church, he feels that love does
deserve some show of mercy. One pays for the sin of love, but not for
all eternity. Nevertheless, he is aware that human love is transient,
destined to lapse into indifference or death.
There is the conflict he must face: should he confess and save him-
self and consign his beloved one to her fate? He refuses either to fool
himself or to cheat God. Incapable of promising the priest that he will
not return to this woman, he denies himself forever the blessing of
peace, and as a responsible man he accepts his doom. He has worked
out a way of dying that no one will ever suspect. Everything has failed
him - love, work, trust. Perhaps "even God is a failure." 14 Now that
he has made up his mind, what was the good of praying? As a Catholic
he realizes that no prayer is effective when one is in a state of mortal
sin. He cannot even trust God, the God who made him, for it was this
same God who had saddled him with responsibility and he is not one
to shift the burden of blame. Justice must be done. "We are all of us
resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to." 15 And so, convinced
that by ending his life he would also spare God further pain, he
commits suicide.
Though Catholics are understandably proud of Greene and his work,
12 Ibid., p. 130.
13 Ibid., p. 140.
14 Ibid" p. 284.
15 Ibid., p. 292.
they are at times sorely troubled by his rebelliousness, his declared love
of heresy as an inalienable right of the creative man. The Heart of the
Matter, when it first came out, was enough to make them pause. Some
of them detected in it the flagrant smell of blasphemy. Greene, how-
ever, is not to be stopped by denunciations or appeals; he is too obsessed
to change. He tells the truth with objectivity of insight, refusing to hide
things. If he dares to indulge in heresy, he rushes to the defence of the
Church whenever he feels it is in danger. He upholds the dogma of the
Assumption of the Virgin. But his faith, as it manifests itself in his
novels, is a complex thing, perpetually in a state of conflict. As a novel-
ist he is naturally more attracted to the sinner, the reprobates, the
damned, than to the unco guid, and he has reasons: they lend them-
selves more fruitfully to the purposes of fiction and make it possible to
portray religion as a never-ending struggle between darkness and light,
faith and negation, God and the Devil.
Greene was too charged with conflict ever to remain an obedient,
conformist Catholic; when, as he followed his creative calling, the con-
flict between faith and art came out into the open there was no ques-
tion, whether he was Catholic or not, what stand he would take. He
affirmed the right of the artist to be disloyal. The novelist cannot
practice his profession without giving voice to his doubts and denials.
It is the battle within that he must reveal without evasion if he values
his integrity. The artist must keep his conscience unmortgaged, not
subservient to doctrine or institutional authority. The Catholic writer in
a secular, rational world must repeatedly face the truth of his faith, the
incompatibility between its assertions and the reality of experience.
In Greene's case, the spiritual struggle counts most, the fight against
evil, the battle with temptation, the search for absolute peace, the
quest, never certain and never completed, for union with God. In The
End of the Affair, structurally his weakest "religious" novel, Greene
achieves intensity and complexity by having as a protagonist a nove-
list, a man who is sensitive and trained to observe his own emotions as
well as those of others. The story opens when his affair with a married
woman, Sarah, has ended. Immediately we are alerted to the nature of
the theme: man's need to believe in a God who contradicts all prin-
ciples of logic and all the premises of empirical inquiry. Since the
novel begins with the end of the affair, the novelist in the story is
compelled to go back in time, to bring back to life the aching and
precious memories of the past.
He remembers the bomb which pinned him beneath a door. Sarah
thinks him dead and begs God for a miracle to bring him back to life.
Later we learn from Sarah's diary what her motives were for leaving
her lover and what caused her to become religious. At first she does
not believe in God and is not even aware that there are arguments to
prove His existence. Thus, when the man she loves is, as she thinks,
lying dead, she kneels on the floor and prays. But why? If there is no
afterlife, then what is the use of such petitions to God? As she kneels,
she wishes she could believe, wishes God would make her believe. At
this moment she makes a kind of compact with God that if her lover is
restored to life, she will believe and will give him up forever.
Greene introduces the character of a fanatical rationalist whose sale
"religion" in life is to strip people of their religious illusions, but all he
succeeds in doing is to drive Sarah more securely into the arms of the
Church. But even there she encounters complications. The Catholic
Church promises the resurrection of the body, whereas her consuming
aim is to escape the bondage of the flesh. The last letter Sarah wrote
her lover reveals the conflict in her nature. Like most people, she
wanted both eternity and the specious, glittering present, both God and
human love. When the Catholic priest will not permit her to annul her
marriage so that she can marry her lover, she revolts at first against
such intolerance. God should be more understanding and more merciful
because He is all-seeing, and yet His mercy sometimes seemed like
punishment. In spite of everything, however, she is prepared to believe,
to accept every miracle as authentic in the face of all the scientific
evidence that miracles are impossible. She writes: ''I've caught belief
like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell into love." 16 And her
lover, the novelist, now that Sarah is dead, broods curiously about the
beginning and end of things, and reflects: "When we get to the end of
human beings we have to delude ourselves into a belief in God .... " 17
Though The Quiet American is not a religious novel in the formal
sense, the pattern of preoccupation remains substantially the same: the
author is concerned fundamentally with the loneliness of the human
situation, the inevitability of death, the paradox of human love. If there
is any lesson we are supposed to derive from this politicized tale, it
is that the missionary zeal of Americans in Vietnam is bound to do
more harm than good. Fowler, an English journalist through whose
disenchanted eyes the story is viewed, has tried to remain aloof from
16 Graham Greene, The End of the Affair. New York: The Viking Press, 1951,
p. 182.
17 Ibid., p. 180.
these conflicts, these purely political passions. He longed for perma-

nence even though he did not believe in it. Happiness was ephemeral.
Nothing lasted. "Death was the only absolute value in my world .... I
envied those who could believe in a God, and I distrusted them. I felt
they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and
the permanent." 18 Death, however final, at least reprieved one from
the nightmare of loss.
Though God is generally present in Greene's fiction, even in his
"entertainments," He is not the protagonist of the tale nor does He
ever function as a deus ex mach ina. He is a strangely hidden, infinitely
patient, and mysterious God. Wisely Greene does not attemptto explain
or justify the ways of God, which are in any event inscrutable, but con-
cerns himself with the search of troubled and sinful men to find the
peace that passeth understanding. They do not find it, of course, though
they may achieve it after they die. Who knows? The issue is left in
doubt. But what makes for extreme dramatic tension in Greene's reli-
gious novels is that the search for God remains paradoxical, enigmatic,
unattainable. Furthermore, what reinforces the psychological complex-
ity of the effect is that Greene never fails to bring in the counterpoint-
ing element of doubt, temptation, evil, sacrilege, heresy, and even
blasphemy. Man, easily tempted to fall, measures our his days in this
desperate oscillation between sin and the hunger for redemption. Al-
ways there looms before him, like a light shining in darkness, the hope
of salvation, only he must reach out for it.
Thus it is not God but man, afflicted, terrified by the imminence and
finality of death, torn between good and evil, who is the central charac-
ter in Greene's fictional tragedies. Marie-Beatrice Mesnet, in her essay
"Graham Greene and the Heart of the Matter," declares: "When all is
said, God is the principal character in Greene's tragedies, the 'third man'
we unconsciously seek." 19 This is a mistaken view of the matter. If
God were the principal character in Greene's tragedies, then they would
cease to be tragedies. No, in each of Greene's religious novels the
emphasis is on the agony of the search, evil that dwells in the heart
of man, the impotence of human beings when they depend on their
own finite powers, their longing for the absolute. God remains un-
knowable, and the only certainty is, as in Brighton Rock, that of
damnation. But if God is not the principal character, He is always pre-
18 Graham Greene. The Quiet .?tmerican. New York: The Viking Press, 1956. p. 50.
19 Marie.Beatrice Mesnet. Grahmn Greene and the Heart of the Matter. London:
Cresset Press, 1954, p. 78.
sent in the background. Greene's most poignant scenes occur when

man, trapped in the midst of life, strives to commune directly with
God and seems to hear God say that failure is not what it seems, that
life is not all evil or a thing of sound and fury. The experience lasts but
a moment, and when it is over the one who has beheld this vision can
never be certain that he has received a genuine message.
The truly religious insight of Greene emerges not in any echo of
theological teaching but in his faith that God made man in His image
and that this image can never be obliterated completely. Man can never
destroy the potentialities of the divine in the depths of the self, even
though as a fallen creature he fights against God. Greene is aware,
of course, of the thorny contradictions to be found in his interpretation
of God and his conception of grace. Faith works paradoxically and in-
comprehensibly. The agony is part of the search, the price of gaining
the vision of God. If the sinner is to escape from his torment, if the
earth-bound self is to gain the peace that it longs for, then this can only
come to pass in death, in the presence of God. In this sense, Greene's
vision of escape is indeed eschatological. But if Greene is possessed by
this faith, he is too sensitive and conscientious an artist to omit the
evidence that contradicts his faith. Respecting the limits of his art, he
tries to describe the lacerating conflicts of conscience, the sense of loss,
the experience of evil, the anguish of doubt and disbelief. Particularly
in the throes of sinning - that is the religious dialectic Greene employs
most effectively - does the religious feeling of his main characters reach
great intensity. Miserable, tainted, tortured, it is through suffering that
they come closer to God and gain a deeper, luminous insight into
spiritual reality. When they are most abandoned, when they feel utterly
lost, it is then that they turn in despair to God. That is how Greene
imaginatively reiterates one of his dominant obsessions, namely, that
it is the sinner who unwittingly achieves sainthood, though the issue
forever hangs in doubt. The tragedy remains, evil is not vanquished, the
quest for God must go on.
It is this concentration on the compulsion of sin, this uncertainty as
to the will of God and the disposition of the soul beyond the grave,
this haunting awareness of the evils of the flesh and the corruptibility
of the heart - it is this which lends dramatic power to Greene's novels
so that they can be read with absorption by non-believers as well as
believers. For though these characters as Catholics pose the problem in
theological terms of damnation and original sin, what they are basically
concerned with is human destiny, the need for wholeness, the urge
toward transcendence. Indeed, this is the ruling motif in Greene's novels.

He does not gloss over the ugly and bitter truth of life. He is not com-
posing religious tracts for the times but is endeavoring to shadow forth
the human essence in all its refractory and numinous mysteriousness.
If he exalts the blessedness of achieved faith, he is also cognizant, no
modern novelist more so, of the horror that infects life.
It is interesting to note that Sean O'Faolain, himself a Catholic,
objects strongly to Greene's conception of man as no longer free to
choose. Thus O'Faolain contends, in The Vanishing Hero, that Greene,
working with such a conception of human nature, tends to degrade
man. His characters are introduced in order to embody a theological
doctrine, a symbolic obsession. "Faith, for him, is not a gift, it is won
from Despair .... His hope of heaven depends on the reality of hell. He
believes in God because he believes in Satan." 20 O'Faolain suspects that
Greene is really writing not fiction but modern miracle plays. Concen-
trating as he does on the universality of evil, Greene finally winds up
with the paradoxical thesis that evil leads not only to repentance but to
God - a God who has a special affection for the wicked.
This doctrinal argument scarcely bothers the untheological reader.
What some readers may find hard to understand is Greene's obsession
with original sin, his fixation on absolute evil. What does absolute evil
consist of? Dru:1kenness? Indulgence in sensuality? Discussing Greene's
work in The Emperor's Clothes, Kathleen Nott says: "You can write
a human book about a Catholic if you do not at the same time write a
book about Catholic theories of human nature." 21 The answer to that,
of course, is that Greene is a novelist who is not concerned with theories
or doctrines but with the difficult task of composing a work of art. He
is a Catholic novelist who is not writing about Catholicism but about
men and women who are Catholics and who fall into sin and who
suffer for their sins. He is not demonstrating the inexorable working
out of Catholic dogma but illustrating the intrusion of mystery in the
unfolding pattern of human fate. He is using the material of the Chris-
tian myth (that the secular novelists have virtually abandoned) to
exhibit the tragic struggle in which the soul of man is involved. In
short, in composing his tragic novels, he rises above the pull of
theological considerations. It is these qualities in his fiction which we
have analyzed - his tendency to identify himself with all mankind, the
20 Sean O'Faolain, The Vanishing Hero. London: Eyre & Spottiswodde, 1956. pp.
74-75. See Philip Stratford, Faith and Fiction. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1964, pp. 163-198.
21 Kathleen Nott, The Emperor's Clothes. London: Heinemann, 1953, p. 309.
guilty as well as the innocent, his uncompromising revelation of the

power of evil, his psychological interest in the sinful and the suffering,
his all-embracing compassion for the torments men endure as they
finally face the certain knowledge of doom - it is these qualities that
make him a tragic (though in a strictly qualified sense) rather than a
specifically Catholic novelist.
CHAPTER X
THE DIALECTICS OF TRAGEDY IN AN AGE

OF UNFAITH
1. THE NEGATIVE CONDITIONS
The problem that confronts the writer in an age of nihilism such as

ours is simply this: how can he create the authentic forms of tragedy
when he has sloughed off all the values of the past which helped to
sustain life and make it meaningful. He is resolved to face the truth
of existence, but what is the truth? He will ask the most profound
question man can ask, Why do things exist rather than nothing? and
then go beyond and inquire, Why the why? In this dialogue between
man and the universe, there are only, as in the solipsistic introspections
that Samuel Beckett presents in the guise of fiction, questions, hypo-
theses, qualified guesses, never a moment of certitude. That is how the
foundations of faith have been undermined. The death of God that
Nietzsche proclaimed seems to coincide with the death of tragedy.
What, then, are the negative conditions which militate against the
emergence of the tragic vision in modern literature? The naturalistic
writer is not afraid to face reality without illusions and he is capable of
shaping a complex body of action in time but he seems to lack the
creative power to inform his material with an aesthetic unity that can
resolve the dichotomies and ambiguities of existence. Operating as he
does within a deterministic framework, how can he justify the whole-
sale suffering and the defeat of the human spirit in the twentieth
century? His philosophy of relativism is ill equipped to cope with
a force of evil that is gratuitous and demoniacal: the bestialities and
abominations committed by the Nazis in the concentration camps at
Belsen and Auschwitz. The supreme deterrent to his mastery of the
tragic vision is his conception of Nature as neutral and of man as the
victim of forces, impersonal and inexplicable, beyond his control. How
is he to impose form upon the discontinuities and contingencies of
existence, for the triwnph of form is dependent upon the perception

of ontological meaning and the meaning is no longer there. How can
tragedy be produced in an age that experiences only fear and trembling
before the specter of nothingness? Nietzsche had anticipated the nature
of the struggle modem man would have to wage: how to live meaning-
fully in the face of nothingness.
Equally influential in drastically revising the sense of the tragic is a
philosopher like Martin Heidegger, with his passion for the night, his
awareness of the contingency that is bound up with every hwnan
project, his personification of nothingness. The essence of tragedy, ac-
cording to him, lay in the conflict between appearance and the dis-
closure of being. The tragic hero resorts to violence in order to escape
from the trap of illusion and his violence is directed against the su-
preme adversary - death. Here is the fearful truth that art brings out
into the open. Not that art offers a vicarious means of achieving sal-
vation, not that it makes visible, in Schopenhaurian terms, the all-
powerful biological will behind the veil of appearances. What it does
is to release man from his immurement in a drug-like routine; it gives
him the courage to speak out what has never before been spoken. Dri-
ven to search out the limits of being, tragic man there discovers that
nothingness is constitutive of the ultimate reality of things. The world
is growing dark, and the essential episodes of this darkening, Heidegger
feels, are not only the standardization of man but the flight of the gods.
This is the mood of despair that highlights the tragic paradox of our
time. Life is absurd, and yet the writer continues to believe that art,
however absurd it may be in a universe that is absurd, helps keep
consciousness alive. The process of transcendence Karl Jaspers describes
in Tragedy Is Not Enough, whereby one hopes to rise above the tragic
only by resolutely facing it, how can it apply to modem man whose
major problem seems to be that of voicing in literature his basic con-
viction - it is the only "faith" he knows - that existence is purposeless?
Camus embodies the metaphysics of absurdity in his play, Caligula.
For the protagonist life is fundamentally unimportant so long as death
serves to wreck the aspirations of man. Life under such conditions is
not to be endured; Caligula is therefore determined to seek the impos-
sible. And his mad "idealism," his revolt against the absurdity of death,
leads to his undoing; he must pay the price for his superior knowledge.
Camus provides the dynamic of dramatic tension by introducing a
character like Cherea, who refuses to stand by idly while life is com-
pletely drained of meaning. "A man can't live," he declares, "without
THE DIALECTICS OF TRAGEDY 141
some reason for living." 1 He draws back in horror from that inhuman
vision of which Caligula is enamored, that reduces life to a speck of
dust in the void, an ephemeral dance of shadows. Having gone far
beyond the laws of God or the laws of men, Caligula chooses to be the
faithful agent of blind fate, wearing "the foolish unintelligible face of
a professional god." 2 And that is how he dooms himself to destruc-
tion. His freedom, after he has rejected the need for happiness or love,
offers him only the freedom to perish at the hands of the assassins. His
revolt proves ineffectual - and absurd. Caligula, like the Sartrean hero,
never achieves a moment of responsible selfhood or principle of re-
conciliation.
In The Misunderstanding, composed in 1943 when France was
occupied by Nazi troops, Camus attempts to create a tragedy of the
absurd. Jan arrives at an inn kept by his mother and his sister Martha
somewhere in the countryside of Bohemia; he hides his identity so as
to surprise them later on and he is not recognized by either one of them.
They plan to kill him and rob him so that they will be able to escape
from this dismal, shut-in valley where it always rains and travel to a
land of perpetual sunshine beside the sea. After drugging Jan and
throwing him into the water, they discover the identity of the victim.
Martha bitterly insists that even if she had recognized her brother
the outcome would have been the same, but the mother, her love for
Jan reborn, refuses to believe that this is so and destroys herself. It is
Martha who remains defiant to the very end. She will die, but she has
no intention of pleading for forgiveness. Like Caligula, she is beyond
the reach of joy and grief and is unmoved by the terrible reproaches of
Jan's wife, Maria. She is alone and she will die alone, by hanging, but
before she dies she wishes to rid Maria of "the illusion that you are
right, that love isn't futile, and that what has happened was an accident.
On the contrary, it's now that we are in the normal order of things ...." 3
And what is the normal order of things? There is no peace for any
man or woman on earth, neither in life nor in death. Life cheats its
victim and lures him with longings that make him suffer for naught. It
is all a dark futility. Only the dead finally know the predestined end for
all those who live. The heart must be turned to stone. That is the only
way to achieve happiness - to become indifferent, like God. Either that
or death. When Maria screams aloud in anguish, begging God for pity,
1 Albert Camus, Caligula and Three Other Plays. Translated by Stuart Gilbert.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958, p. 21.
'l! Ibid., p. 44.
3 Ibid., p. 132.
the old servant of the household enters but all he says in clear, firm
tones is the single syllable: "No." Camus tells us that this servant does
not necessarily represent the voice of fate. Maria calls upon God and
he enters the room - merely another example of ironic "misunderstand-
ing." He cannot help her, but then no one can help others at certain
levels of suffering, for pain is solitary.
If one wishes to seize upon this last incident as symbolic of the
human condition, then it is obvious that man can appeal to no one, no
supernatural power, for aid. The Misunderstanding, like Caligula,
completely reverses the tragic pattern: there is defiance but no expres-
sion of grandeur and no possibility of transcendence. The same stricture
holds true of Waiting for Godot, which, as we saw, epitomizes the
futile search for a salvation that can never be found because man has
ceased to believe in it. Man is simply deluded. Can there be an urge to
greatness in those who know only one thing: that the truth of being is
summed up in the truth of dying? The unheroic hero of our day accepts
defeat without experiencing any transfiguring moment of illumination.
2. THE C H R 1ST I A i\ MY THO S A;,\ D THE

TRAGIC RESOLUTION
The interpretation of the tragic sense of life, in fiction, drama, or

poetry, traces the pilgrimage of man on earth, his struggle, always
against tremendous odds, to fulfill himself and to affirm his existence,
even though death may suddenly end his career. Such a metaphysical
conception of the tragic vision is charged with a number of contra-
dictions that must somehow be resolved. For a pilgrimage implies a
destination, whereas this pilgrimage is today without an ascertainable
meaning or goal except the one that man himself provides. He affirms
life because there is nothing else which he can affirm, but death, the fell
sergeant, may arrest him at any moment, and then what becomes of his
pilgrimage? The religious faith that once succeeded in reconciling man
to the pain and brevity of life on earth is no longer available - at least
not on the old terms - to the modern writer as a source of plenary
inspiration. But he knows that so long as the experiment of life goes
on man will seek to triumph over the night of chaos, and he will do so
through the mediation, with all its tensional paradoxes, of the tragic
vision. For though Chaos and Old Night wait to devour him, it is al-
ways man who is the hero of tragedy. It is always man who struggles
"desperately and endlessly to carve out of a chaotic and cruel cosmos a
world of order and justice. In a sense, man has never succeeded in that
effort, nor, in the very nature of the situation, can he possibly suc-
ceed." 4 Though bound to suffer defeat, he persists courageously in the
struggle, since he has no other alternative. It is by his willingness to
face and fight against the beleaguering and ultimately victorious pow-
ers of darkness and death that he affirms his human "greatness" and
justifies his revolt against the absurd. He fights, even if in vain, in
order to ensure the victory of light over darkness, good over evil, life
over death, and in doing so he achieves a precarious moment of triumph
over tragedy without escaping from his tragic condition.
In modern tragedy, or what passes for tragedy, this existential ambi-
guity is not only greatly intensified but coupled with a negativity born
of the vision of nothingness that hems in the life of man, whose only
distinction - it is the mark of his humanity - consists in the fact that
his consciousness can grasp the emptiness of being. In The Devil and
the Good Lord, one of Sartre's most revealing anti-Christian plays,
Goetz arrives at the knowledge that God does not exist. God neither
sees him nor hears him nor knows him.
You see this emptiness over our heads? That is God. You see this gap in the door?
It is God. You see that hole in the ground? That is God again. Silence is God.
Absence is God. God is the loneliness of man. There was no one but myself; I alone
decided on Evil; and I alone invented God. It was I who cheated, I who worked
miracles, I who accuse myself today, I alone who can absolve myself; I, man. If God
exists, man is nothing ....5
This, then, is what characterizes the Sartrean hero, be he Goetz or

Orestes in The Flies, in his quarrel with God whose existence he both
affirms and denies: his adherence to the truth of being. The myth of
nothingness, like the Kierkegaardian "leap" of faith, is hedged round
with paradox. If God exists, man is nothing; but if man knows there is
no God, then he in effect becomes God. That is the simple idea the play
is designed to reinforce dramatically: "if God is dead, the only thing
left to do is to serve men." 6 This resembles the "mad" logic of Kirillov
which justifies not only suicide but rebellion. The rebellion, however,
is now given a different direction: it is to take the form of participation
in the class struggle.
The Weltanschauung dominant in modern expressions of the tragic
vision stands opposed to and yet cannot break away from the Christian
4 Herbert Weisinger, Tragedy alld the Paradox oj the Fortunate Fall. East Lansing:
Michigan State College Press, 1953, p. 271.
5 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Devil and the Good Lord. Translated by Kitty Black.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960, p. 141.
6 Philip Thody, Jean-Paul Sal·lre. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1960, p. 107.
mythos. But the progressive discrediting of the Judaeo-Christian out-

look entailed a great loss. Christianity succeeded in vanquishing the
pagan world and in triumphing over all opposition because it offered
the unique solace of the supernatural, the doctrine of redemption, the
example of Christ crucified, the myth of a Messiah who died for man-
kind on the cross, a myth that exalted sorrow and suffering, robbed
death of its cruel sting, and invested the moral struggle of man on
earth with the significance of the sacred. The Christian mythos was
once a passionately cherished and lived truth. It was not looked upon as
a vital fiction, an expression of the all-too-human craving for illusion.
The eighteenth century had striven to replace the folly of myth by the
rule of reason, to dispense completely with the service of the miracu-
lous. 7 And Paul Tillich concedes that since the beginning of the eigh-
teenth century God has been steadily removed from "the power field
of man's activities." 8 In the nineteenth century, Matthew Arnold form-
ulated his humanistic definition of God as the Eternal Power, not our-
selves, that makes for righteousness.
In a world in which the transcendent has been sealed off, how is the
tragic vision to find expression? How, above all, is the religious con-
flict to be creatively assimilated and given form? Only by showing, as
Dostoevski did in his fiction, that the religious life is instinct with the
dialectic of doubt and subject to Manichaean pressures, the uprush of
the demonic. That is the struggle between faith and unfaith which, as
we have seen in the case of Joyce, Mauriac, and Greene, writers present
in their work. As Heidegger declares, "a faith that does not perpetually
expose itself to the possibility of unfaith is not faith but merely a con-
vemence
•
.... " 9
Nietzsche, in The Twilight of the Idols, had maintained: "We deny
God, we deny responsibility in God; thus alone do we save the
world." 10 The world has not been saved, and the figure of God survives
all attacks, even though God is present only when man invokes his
name and addresses him in prayer. In discussing post-war writers and
their relation to God, Faulkner declares surprisingly: "I think that no
7 Frank E. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods. Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1959.
8 Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959,
p. 43.
9 Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Ralph Manheim.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959, p. 7.
10 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, in The Complete Works oj
Friedrich Nietzsche. Translated by Anthony M. Ludovici. New York: The Macmillan Com·
pany, 1911, XVI, p. 43.
writing will be too successful without some conception of God, you

can call Him by whatever name you want." 11 Sartre, he indicates, utter-
ly lacks this conception while Camus possesses it. Hemingway, in his
early writing, tended to avoid the religious issue and thrust his charac-
ters into the void until, suddenly, in The Old Man and the Sea, he
found God. But Faulkner's own vision of God retains its ambiguous
character. For Sartre God is not only a myth but a useless gift. Modern
literature thus keeps the archetypal images of God and Devil, sin and
sacrifice, heaven and hell, but these are utilized largely as vital fictions
designed to probe the relation of man to a universe that remains
inscrutable.
If the writers of today turn for inspiration to such mystical literary
ancestors and such thinkers as Kierkegaard, it is because these men
pictured with unsparing insight the spiritual crisis of our time. Contem-
porary novelists and dramatists search for new forms of expression to
embody their tragic vision of a world to which they cannot reconcile
themselves. Their religious nostalgia manifests itself in the persistence
with which they continue to press inquiry beyond the limits of being.
Not without a profound sense of guilt do they reveal the disintegrative
forces at work in the secularized culture of the West, yet they cannot
remain silent. Though they espouse no religious doctrine, they grapple
with ontological enigmas that are not unrelated to the religious quest.
The plays of Eugene O'Neill record his unavailing search for a faith
by which he might live. Days Without End portrays the struggle in a
man between his religious impulses and his diabolical need to deny
God. O'Neill has no solution to offer. The human quest for meaning is
futile. Man is an alien on earth; the mind is its own heaven and hell;
the mystery that governs existence cannot be dispelled. O'Neill's neu-
rotic heroes are made to suffer but they are unreconciled to their fate.
Death is the final answer to all their troubled questions. Though born
a Catholic, O'Neill, like Joyce, could not accept Catholicism; he strugg-
led hard with his own spiritual conflicts and the struggle is vividly
reflected in his major plays. At the end of Days Without End he affirms
the supernatural, but the various drafts of this play show how he os-
cillated between the supernatural and "natural" resolution of the basic
conflict. In one version, the fourth draft, he entirely abandons the
Catholic solution. In what was allowed to stand as the last version, "the
earlier conception of Christ as a symbol of suffering man merges with
11 Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner (eds.), Faulkner in the University.
Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 1959, p. 161.
the belief in the existence of God, becoming a belief in Christ as

God." 12
This is the only play in which Christianity is affirmed. In all his
other work, the doubt and the denial predominate. Life is indeed a
strange interlude. Every man undergoes suffering, but there is no con-
trolling system of justice which metes Out suffering and punishment.
O'Neill's tragedies, like those of Camus, exhibit no transcendent moral
order, no correspondence between dream and reality, ethical striving
and fulfillment. The crucial problem of the tragic vision in our time is
to show how it is possible for man to reconcile himself to an indifferent,
if not hostile, universe. Today the tragic spirit is tough-minded, aware
of its own limitations; it safeguards itself against illusion by ironically
questioning its own provisional beliefs, exposing its "faith" to the pos-
sibility of unfaith, knowing that nothing lasts and that nothing in this
mysterious universe is sacred but life itself.
12 Doris V. Falk, Eugene O'Seili .md the Trag;c ~·ei!sion. ~ew BrunswicC::
Rutgers Cniversity Press, 1958, p. 152.
PART III
THE SUMMING UP
CHAPTER XI
CONCLUSION
The social world of today is on the edge of

chaos. The most habitual wearer of rose-colored
glasses must admit it. A man who sings with
Browning's Pippa
God's in his heaven -
All's right with the world.
is not an optimist; he is a fool. God died on
November 24, 1859, and every day since the
mound of earth above His grave has been piled
higher.
Harvey Eagleson, "The Beginning of Modern
Literature," in Hardin Craig (ed.) , Stanford
Studies in Language and Literature. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1941, p. 358.
Mankind has reached the end of the road and is about to die: that is
the despairing diagnosis pronounced by many of the leading creative
spokesmen of our age. God is dead and man too is dead, and it little
matters now whether the world will go out with a whimper or a bang.
Whether or not there are sufficient warranted grounds for such a philo-
sophy of doom is beside the point; the fact remains that many writers
believe Western civilization may soon be wiped Out in an atomic
holocaust when Armageddon is fought.
Whatever conflicts the Victorian mind had to face, it was never, in
its worst moments of struggle with the grim implications of Darwinism,
afflicted with the conviction that the world was headed for the abyss.
In the Victorian era, the heart beat steadily, the conscience of man was
not tOO heavily weighed down with multiple burdens of nameless
anxiety, generation gave way to generation in a cycle of continuity that
was enormously reassuring in its rhythm, and few with dismal fore-
boding ventured to question whether this would go on to the last
syllable of recorded time, forever. Optimistic in outlook, the Victorians
believed in the reality of progress, the universal validity of the moral
law, the perfectibility of man; the world, they were convinced, was
moving toward the consummation of some divine, far-off event. Carlyle
could not reconcile himself to "an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since
the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe.... " 2 Though the Vic-
2 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1948, p. 122.
150 THE SUMMING UP
torians were plagued by the problem of belief they had not abandoned
God, however much their interpretation of his nature might be modi-
fied, and God had not abandoned them.
The picture of the universe as governed by Providence was cruelly
shattered by a number of scientific discoveries that regarded Nature as
exclusively a biological proces or as a neutral, brute, and blind me-
chanism. In the past the human personality succeeded well in adjusting
itself to the various traumatic blows delivered by revolutionary dis-
coveries about the structure of the world and the nature of man. It is
the prospect of global warfare with deadly technological weapons of
destruction that may wipe out the whole of civilization, which has
stripped man of his Promethean megalomania and made a mockery
not only of his ideals but also his religious beliefs. The remarkable
thing about the intellectual of our day is that he still seems to possess
sufficient energy to compose his swan song, though here he is perhaps
responding to an imperative of the spirit which calls for a devotion to
his creative task that neither radical skepticism nor absolute moral des-
pair can overcome. Even as he gives up the human experiment on earth
as a hopeless failure, he is already speculating feverishly on how best to
shape the substance of his vision of doomsday.
But how long can the modern intellectuals remain trapped in this
nightmare? Life is to be lived, no matter how intensely the mind
negates it on logical grounds. What the writers of our age hunger for
is a "religion" that will make their life meaningful, though they do not
equate this "religious" yearning with the Christian doctrine of faith.
For all their interest in the writings of Kierkegaard, they cannot em-
brace the higher truth of revelation. Kierkegaardian subjectivity may
make out that the divine is featured exactly like the absurd, but they
stubbornly hold back from the act of irrational commitment. Not for
them the supreme illogic of the syllogism: It is absurd to believe in
God; therefore I believe. They do not believe. Like Sartre, they behold
a universe which is not lighted by the shining symbols of God's pre-
sence.
But Christianity lives on. The Church somehow endures, with its
soaring spires, its crosses towering over cities, its shrines, its bells tolling
the faithful to prayer and reminding them of their mortality, its vision
of Heaven and Hell. These archetypal images form an integral part of
the culture of the West. Science may have ousted supernatural terms
of reference in its universe of discourse, but these archetypal images live
on as memory and myth, image and symbol. Today, however, the pro-
CONCLUSION 151
cess of transcendence is related to an All-Encompassing, to use Karl

Jaspers' expression, that has nothing divine about it in the old sense.
But the quest for transcendence is not abandoned - that is the im-
portant thing.
Why is this so? Because man's curse is also his blessing. Because
the intellectual cannot deny the miracle of consciousness, the specifically
human endowment that differentiates him from the animal kingdom.
It is his consciousness that catches intimations of the numinous and per-
ceives, however dimly, the images of the Wholly Other, whether it be
called "nausea" or Nirvana, God or Nothingness. It is his consciousness
that is aware of the dualism between Nature and spirit, even though he
recognizes that man is also part of Nature. Consciousness is a source of
suffering, but it is also the force that bids man aspire to be like unto
God.
We have tried to present evidence, drawn from both the religious
and secular literature of our age, designed to show that the virtual
bankruptcy of the traditional Christian faith induced a widespread mood
of spiritual despair. The revolutionary idea of human freedom emerged
in a universe in which everything was relativised. As Everett W.
Knight sums up the dilemma of modern consciousness in Literature
Considered as Philosophy:
Combine the idea of the relativity of values with that of human freedom, and there
is no longer any reason why man should not create his own values, why God should
not be replaced by man. We are here at the very heart of our modern dilemma. Can a
civilization survive the extinction of its beliefs; must man believe in something beyond
himself, or will he prove capable of creating and respecting his own laws? 3
These are the very questions that have been raised in the course of this
study, particularly in the chapters devoted to Dostoevski and Nietzsche.
How can man live in a world that fails utterly to conform to his crying
need for order and meaning?
The modern age gives birth to a literature that is metaphysical rather
than strictly "religious" in its search for the truth of being. Existentialist
writers, under the leadership of Sartre, refuse to interpose a screen of
faith between vision and experience; they return to the observation of
things in themselves. The universe is seen as - and therefore is - absurd.
Nothing is settled. The future remains indeterminate; the fate of the
world is not preordained. Man is responsible for the choices he makes
in a universe that is without any fixed or transcendent goals or categori-
3 Everett W. Knight. Literatm'e Considered as Philosophy. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1957, p. 30.
152 THE SUMMING UP
cal imperatives in the sphere of morality. Existentialist fiction and

drama simply deny that reason can discover the structure, whatever
that may be, of the universe.
What is remarkable in the literature of the twentieth century is not
only the rise to dominance of the unconscious, the efflorescence of
Expressionist drama, but also this attempt, as in the fiction of Malraux,
to capture the purity of perception, without the distortion of the analyti-
cal intellect. The fight the Existentialists led was against a rationalism
which had confined the rich and fascinatingly diverse world of ex-
perience within a narrow framework of abstraction. If the universe was
absurd, it was the consciousness of man that beheld the absurdity and
decided to revolt against it. The act of writing about it with un-
compromising honesty of vision, the effort to understand it and deal
with it creatively, marks a courageous human decision not to submit to
its paralyzing influence - a paradox which Paul Tillich makes much of
in his work. Or, in Jaspers' language, it symbolizes the indefeasible
human longing for transcendence. The Existentialist quest for authenti-
city in life and literature represents a paradoxical commitment that is,
in effect, a negation of the absurd, even though the Existentialist hero
knows he is forever cut off from all sources of divine grace.
In this crisis of the spirit, as the fear mounts that the egg of the
world is about to break into countless fragments, the twentieth-century
writer finds himself emotionally blocked, spiritually deranged and
helpless, not knowing where to turn or what to do, though fully reali-
zing that he must make some gesture, however desperate, which will
avert the fatality of doom. He must somehow master the chaos of
despair that rages in his own heart and mind and summon forth the
creative strength to resist the inroads of death. He has thrown off the
tyranny of God, he is now free, but it is this very freedom that has
proved such a dreadful burden, a shirt steeped in Nessus' blood that
he must wear.
In an age suffering from collective anxiety generated by a frighten-
ed awareness of the imminence of atomic doom, he can only utter an
Everlasting Nay. He no longer believes in the possibility of faith.
Today man is faced with a crucial choice between a skepticism that
remains negative and absolute, blind to the incalculable potentialities
of the human spirit, and a skepticism that, after exhausting all the
possibilities of doubt, abandons the dementia of doubt for a faith that
tries to transcend the limitations of the self and rise above the nihilistic
despairs of its age. By what gesture of affiliation, by what life-nour-
CONCLUSION 153
ishing symbol or myth incorporated within the testament of literature,

can modern man achieve the solidarity of fellowship that brings
release from the horror of annihilation? How can he recover his lost
faith in the dignity and worth of the human personality and reaffirm
his belief that life, despite all its tragic vicissitudes, has value?
According to T.S. Eliot in "Ash Wednesday": "This is the time of
tension between dying and birth." What is this birth to be? Though the
intellectuals of our time are agreed as to the necessity for drawing
up some viable, universal faith, there is no consensus as to what that
faith should be. Each poet, each novelist, each dramatist believes in his
own prescription for salvation: humanism, Catholicism, Existentialism,
anarchism, the perennial philosophy, conservatism revisited, logical
positivism, Communism. This ideological richness of confusion testifies
not to the emergence of a spiritual renaissance but to the spiritual dis-
integration of the Western world. Herbert Read looks forward to a
cultural reawakening that will be centered in the single person, the
regeneration of the individual. Auden, on the other hand, warns that
it is fatal to depend on the rational life, on science, mechanism,
technology. The fatality of the romantic hero, as Auden makes clear in
The Enchafed Flood, is that he strove like Brand to be sufficient unto
himself. Religion at least curbs the overweening pretensions of the ego
and teaches the value of humility, the wisdom of not expecting too
much from finite and imperfect man, the knowledge that there are no
short cuts to the city of salvation.
Even the secularists have been forced to revise their conception of
human nature. Instead of preparing in advance a chart of utopia, an
ideological prospectus for the ideal commonwealth of the future, they
first take stock of human beings as they are, lacking in knowledge and
insight and control, perverse creatures of passion. Abandoned is the
dream of a golden age and perfect human beings living in a classless
paradise. Arthur Koestler, once an active member of the Communist
Party, describes his quest of utopias of one kind or another when he
believed in the mystique of the proletariat. "Now, however," he writes
in Arrow in the Blue, "after the shattering catastrophes which have
brought the Age of Reason and Progress to a close, the void has made
itself felt. The epoch in which I grew up was an age of disillusion and
an age of longing." 4
In a lecture delivered at the opening session of Unesco at the Sor-
4 Arthur Koestler, Arrow in the Blue. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1954,
p. 52.
154 THE SUMMING UP
bonne, Andre Malraux called for the resurrection of man as well as the
unification of Europe. Man, he now feels, must come to grips with his
fundamental nature. Earnestly he bids man liberate himself from the
outworn conceptions of rationalism and the idea of progress by mobili-
zing the forces of redemption that lie slumbering in the depths, in
responding to the mandates of what he recognizes as his divine element.
But the humanism that Europe and America will have to adopt is a
tragic humanism, a humanism that denies the existence of God.
If Tillich is correct in his assessment of the contemporary cultural
situation and justified in assuming that "he who seriously denies God,
affirms Him," 5 then the writer who gives expression to his ontological
dolor is voicing the passion of his religious commitment. He wishes to
live - and create - meaningfully; hence "religiously," though he cannot
endorse any of the formal creeds. Many of the literary nihilists of our
day reject Christianity because it is not sufficiently "religious" in their
sense. What they seek is not dogma but some all-embracing vision of
the truth that will somehow render the meaninglessness of life meaning-
ful. Thus, in the very extremity of their anti-religious questioning, one
discovers a number of religious motifs: their impassioned dedication to
the truth, their refusal to live, or write, a lie, their call for compassion,
and, what is true of some, their demand that man acknowledge his
inherent limitations. They adhere to the ideal of spiritual transcendence
without accepting the theistic outlook. In a non-theistic system, accord-
ing to Erich Fromm, "there is no meaning to life, except the meaning
man himself gives to it.... " 6
God exists, Jung maintains in Answer to Job, because man chooses
to believe in him. Thus God grows in insight as man evolves. Were
man to abandon the idea of God, then God would die - and this is, in
fact, what has happened. Yet why, if God is but a dream of desire, an
archetypal image, should humanity through the ages have clung
so passionately to the conception of the living God? Either religion is
the opium of the people who would go mad if they had to face the
empty infinite spaces or else it embodies a spiritual truth without which
no culture can long survive. The Grand Inquisitor, in The Brothers
Karamazov, is tempted to burn Jesus at the stake when the Savior
returns to earth and brings a dead child back to life. For the Grand
Inquisitor knows what the people want: they must be given their daily
5 Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1948. p. xv.
6 Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving. New York: Harper & Bros., 1956, p. 72.
CONCLUSION 155
bread, they must be denied the freedom to think, they must be led to
believe that after death there will be resurrection and redemption in
Paradise, so that they will be resigned to their brief miserable interlude
of existence on earth. They must even be granted the right to sin so
long as the Church is invested with the authority to grant remission
of sins. Only the rulers of the populace, as in Plato's ideal republic, will
take on themselves this tragic burden of life, the knowledge that there
is nothing beyond the grave. As Alyosha is quick to point out, the
philosophy of religion embodied in this tale of the Grand Inquisitor
could only have been thought by a profoundly skeptical man. It is so;
the story sprang out of the demonic mind of Ivan. For the truly
religious person, knowing that God is hidden and that the principle of
the divine remains a mystery, requires no miracles as proof. He believes,
in the manner of the saintly Alyosha, even though he would find it im-
possible to define in logical terms exactly what it is he believes.
It is Ivan, however, not Alyosha, who dominates the modern literary
scene: the outsider who, as in Samuel Beckett's or Camus's world,
rejects not only the absurdity of God's creation but God himself. Since
he can discover no vital faith that will unify and justify his life, he
must, like Nietzsche, strive to achieve an "aesthetic" resolution of his
existential problem, even though the resolution turns out to be bale-
fully negative in its defiance. Vengefully seeking to pierce the paste-
board mask of life, Ahab hurls the spear and is drawn under, the
Pequod sinks, but Tashtego nails the flag fast to the subsiding vessel.
But even Heaven is involved in this climax of catastrophe; a sky-hawk
is nailed by the submerged savage to the flag of Ahab and goes down
with the ship, "which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had
dragged a living part of heaven along with her.... " 7 The negativity is
vital in that it affirms the indomitable spirit of man.
The religious writer, on the other hand, longs to believe and strives
to affirm that there is a divine plan which, despite all frustrations and
setbacks, does finally get itself fulfilled. This is the clash of opposites,
the conflict of ontological values, which the modern writer sets forth in
the polarities of the tragic vision: either he lives entirely for the sake
of his art and accepts the absurd or revolts against it or, like Kierke-
gaard, he struggles to abandon the aesthetic for the religious stage.
Nietzsche versus Kierkegaard: that is the contest being fought out,
without hope of a decisive victory for either side, in the literary arena
of our time. But the more aesthetic "outwardness" there is present -
7 Herman Melville, Moby Dick. New York: The Modern Library, 1926, p. 565.
156 THE SUMMING UP
and outwardness in this context would mean exclusive devotion to the

creative life - the less religious inwardness.
Hence, in our envisagement of the problem, an aesthetic of Christian
transcendence cannot exist, though some critics seem to be moving in
that direction. The writer who deals with the tragic vision cannot im-
pose a miraculous resolution of the conflict. There is no gospel of re-
demption that alone is sufficient to insure the salvation of the world.
Though Murray Krieger, in The Tragic Vision, grants the validity of
the Manichaean vision of existential reality, he nevertheless conceives
of a Christian system of aesthetics which, rooted in the uniqueness of
the personal self, would still preserve the ambiguities and contradictions
of existence, since man, despite his personal uniqueness, must pass from
the earthly scene. The Christian writer who bears this vision and
acknowledges the enigma of reality "may be ready to say through faith
that behind the Manichaean face there is a deeper reality in God, in
whose eyes all absurdities are miraculously resolved." 8 But this leap of
transcendence, as this author frankly acknowledges, is simply the
apotheosis of the absurd. It cannot constitute an aesthetic system,
"since it cannot be communicated or subjected to dramatic portrayal." 9
Hence in the twentieth century we must look for signs of "the
religious" motif in media that are not formally committed to Christian
doctrine. It is not, in any case, a question of measuring the religious
conformity of a writer and designating his work as "Catholic" or
"Protestant" or "agnostic" or "atheistic." The writer, be he a Rilke or a
Yeats, a Samuel Beckett or a Graham Greene, a Camus or a Franc;ois
Mauriac, is an imaginative truth-sayer and seer who cannot be kept
within the fold of orthodoxy; he keeps faith not with dogma but with
life in all its surprising splendor and impenetrable mysteriousness.
Even if he seeks to convey symbolically his intuition of the super-
natural life in literature, the expression, if it comes through at all, is
never theologically pure but heretical. He may listen for "the classicism
of mystery: God," as Jean Cocteau puts it,lO but the more devoutly he
listens for the voice of God to speak the more confirmed his feeling
that literature is impossible. 11 A Christian aesthetic is, from our point
of view, a contradiction in terms.
8 Murray Krieger, The Tragic Vision. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1960, p. 265.
9 Ibid., p. 266.
10 Art and Faith. Letters between Jacques Maritain and Jean Cocteau. Translated by
John Coleman. New York: Philosophical Library, 1948, p. 49.
11 Ibid., p. 54.
CONCLUSION 157
The dualism that consciousness perceives between flesh and spirit,

the temporal and the eternal, Nature and self, cannot be resolved by the
thaumaturgic strategies of art or by a passionate avowal of faith. The
writer cannot afford to blind himself to the flagrant fact of evil or the
forces that deny the faith he would fain exalt. He must plunge into the
heart of the storm and permit the struggle to take its course without
interference. The principle thus works both ways: the rebel must try
to do full justice to the opposing call of the divine and the God-inspired
visionary must be aware of the puissant temptations of revolt. Reality
must not be compromised. Literature, if it is unsparingly honest in its
revelation of reality, cannot help but reflect a world that is disharmoni-
ous, if not inexplicable and absurd. Tragic writers like Dostoevski
reveal both visions, the negative and the transcendence of the negative,
the demonic and the divine, while suspecting that both are illusions.
Despite Nietzsche's fierce attacks on Christianity, God still survives
as a vital archetypal image in the literature of our age. 12 After thou-
sands of years of faith and worship, the spirit of man could not
suddenly cast off the Power and the Glory. God still haunts the
literary consciousness of the twentieth century, but, as we have tried to
show, the conception of God has been radically transformed. God is
affirmed in fear and trembling, in the knowledge that faith is ob-
jectively uncertain, if not absurd. Nietzsche as anti-Christ sounds
curiously like an evangelist. No figures in the history of literature
illustrates more poignantly the operation of the law of polarity: the
nihilist doubts his doubts as compulsively as the believer on occasion
questions the validity of his faith. Both are tormented, Ivan and
Alyosha Karamazov, Shatov and Kirillov, with the craving for assuran·
ces that can never be forthcoming; no concept can grasp God. The
terms used by both Christian writers and literary humanists to describe
the nature of the spiritual struggle - the void, the dark night of the
soul, emptiness, abandonment, estrangement, vertigo, nausea, alien-
ation - confirm the truth of this diagnosis.
If it is madness to live without the theistic conception of God, then
the most influential writers of our time are "mad." Twentieth-century
literature is a haunting threnody that laments, even as it rejoices in, the
death of the old God. It is evident, we hope, from our presentation of
the religious problem in literature that the modern writer, though he
12 For a study of archetypal images of God in modern poetry see Maud Bodkin,
Studies of Type-Images in Poetry, R.eligion, and Philosophy. London and New York:
Oxford University Press, 1951.
158 THE SUMMING UP
hails the new-born freedom of man, is in search of a new "religious"

vision, one that will enable him to affirm his humanity and define his
role in the dialogue that always goes on, even in a relativized universe,
between the profane and the sacred, between man and God.
INDEX
Agee, James, 101-105, 112; A Death in State of Siege, 32; The Stranger, 11, 12-
the Family, 101-105, 109, 110, 112; Let 13, 23, 107
Us Now Praise Famous Men, 102 "Camus's Quest for God," 13n.
Anderson, Sherwood, Winesburg, Ohio, Carlyle, Thomas, Sartor Resartus, 149
47-48 Celine, Louis-Ferdinand, 88
Arnold, Matthew, 57, 144; "Rugby Cha- Cocteau, Jean, Art and Faith, 156
pel," 53 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 66
Artzybashef, Michael, 81
Atkins, John, Graham Greene, 123n. Dali, Salvador, 25
Auden, W. H., 70; The Enchafed Flood, 153 Dante, 1Ilferno, 53
Darwin, Charles, The Origin of Species, 122
Bakunin, Michael, 4, 6; God and the Dauvin, Rene, 24
State, 4 Descartes, Rene, 18
Beauvoir, Simone de, The Second Sex, Dostoevski, Fyodor, 5-6, 18, 19-20, 23, 27,
39-40 28, 32, 37, 39, 41, 70, 71-87, 89,91-93,
Beckett, Samuel, 8, 15, 17, 24, 33-35, 39, 94, 98, 100, 102, 106-107, 110, 114,
53, 73, 98, 99, 100, 107, 109, 139, 155, 120, 144, 151, 157; Atheism, 5; The
156; The Un namable, 34-35; Watiting Brothers Karamazov, 56, 74, 81-85,
for Godot, 15, 142 154-155; Crime and Punishmem, 74, 76-
Bernanos, Georges, 115, 116, 123 78, 89; The Idiot, 19, 74-76, 106; Notes
Blake, William, 67, 101 from the Underground, 6, 19-20; The
Biotner, Joseph L., 145n. Possessed, 6, 74, 79-81, 90, 91-93, 96-
Bodkin, Maud, Studies of Type-Images in 97, 101-102, 106-107
Poetry, Religion, and Philosophy, 157n. Dreiser, Theodore, 4, 38-39; Sister Carrie,
Bowles, Paul, 88, 109 39; "What I Believe," 4
Brandes, George, 64
Brinnin, John Malcolm, D)-lan Thomas in Eagleson, Harvey, "The Beginning of Mo-
America, IOn. dern Literature," 149
Brod, Max, 22n. Elias, Robert H., 39
Brooks, Cleanth, Literary Criticism, 60n. Eliot, T. S., 10, 21, 44, 58, 118, 153; "Ash
Browning, Robert, 149 Wednesday," 153; On Poetry and Poets,
Butler, Samuel, The Way of All Flesh, 46 10; "Tradition and the Individual Ta-
lent," 21; The Waste Land, 21, 44
Camus, Albert, 11, 12-13, 23, 32-33, 39, Existentialism, 7-8, 30-32, 91, 94, 97, 108,
88, 91, 95-97, 97-98, 107, 109, 117, 114, 151-152
140-142, 145, 146, 155, 156; Caligula, "Existentialist Criticism," 57n.
140-141, 142; The Misunderstanding,
141-142; The Myth of Sisyphus, 95-96, Falk, Doris V., Eugene O'Neill and the
107; The Plague, 33; The Rebel, 33; The Tragic Tension, 145-146
160 INDEX
Faulkner, William, 17, 23, 112, 117, 119- Ibsen, Henrik, Ghosts, 50
121, 144-145; As I Lay Dying, 119, 120;
A Fable, 119, 120; Light in August, 119; Jackson, Robert 1., Dostoevsky's Under·
Sanctuary, 119; The Sound and the Fury, ground Man in Russian Literature, 20
44, 97, 99, 112, 119, 120 James, Henry, 106; "The Lesson of the
Fitch, Robert Elliot, The Decline and Fall Master," 124
of Sex, 36-37 Jaspers, Karl, 140, 151, 152; Tragedy Is
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby, 48; Not Enough, 140
Tender Is the Night, 48; This Side of Joyce, James, 11-12, 15, 42, 46-47, 58,
Paradise, 48 100, 102, 117, 123, 144, 145; A Por·
Flores, Angel, Franz Kafka Today, 24n. trait of the Artist as a Young Man, 11-12,
Freud, Sigmund, 18, 97 46, 101; Ulysses, 12, 46-47, 86, 101
Fromm, Erich, The Art of Loving, 36, 52, Jung, Carl G., Answe~ to Job, 154
154
Fuller, Edmund, Man in Modern Fiction, Kafka, Franz, 20, 22-25, 26, 29, 33, 39,
119 40, 117; The Castle, 24, 25; The Meta-
morphosis, 25; The Trial, 23, 24
Galsworthy, John, 49 Kierkegaard, Soren, 5, 6, 21, 22, 24, 29, 40,
Gide, Andre, 26-28, 39, 42, 45-46, 71, 87, 41, 53, 57, 58, 59, 60-64, 65, 66, 67, 68,
90-91; The Counterfeiters, 27; Dos· 69, 70, 71, 72, 85, 87, 91, 145, 150, 155;
toevsky, 71, 87; Journals, 27 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 59-
Goethe, 68n. 60, 61, 62, 63; Either/Or, 5, 40, 61; The
Gorky, Maxim, 81 Journals, 6
Gorz, Andre, The Traitor, 8-9, 15-16 Kinsey, Albert c., 37; Kinsey Report, 42
Greene, Graham, 72-73, 94, 112, 115, 116- Knight, Everett W., Literature Considered
117, 119, 121, 122-138, 144, 156; as Philosophy, 18, 27, 151
Brighton Rock, 125-126, 135; The End Koestler, Arthur, Arrow in the Blue, 153
of the Affair, 133-134; The Heart of the Krieger, Murray, The Tragic Vision, 60n.,
Matter, 92, 130-133; Journey without 156
Maps, 123; The Labyrinthine Ways, 127; Krook, Dorothea, Three Traditions of Mo-
T he Lost Childhood and Other Essays, ral Thought, 48n.
122-123; The Power and the Glory,
127-129; The Quiet American, 134- Lawrence, D. H., 48-49, 52, 117-119, 129;
135; "The Revolver in the Cupboard," Apocalypse, 49; The Man Who Died, 48,
94; Why Do I Write?, 122 119; "The Novel," 117; The Plumed
Gwynn, Frederick 1., Faulkner in the Uni· Serpent, 117-119; "The Risen Lord,"
versity, 145n. 49; Sons and Lovers, 49
Lea, F. A., The Tragic Philosopher, 38
Hardy, Thomas, 20, 132 Lewis, R. W. B., The Picaresque Saint, 114
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 43, 44, 100, 106, Lipton, Lawrence, The Holy Barbarians, 43
110; The House of Seven Gables, 106; Literature and Religion, lIn., 97n.
The Marble Faun, 106; The Scarlet Lovejoy, Arthur 0., The Great Chain of
Letter, 43 Being, 3n.
Heidegger, Martin, 8, 22, 99, 110, 140;
An Introduction to Metaphysics, 144 MacLeish, Archibald, J.B., 53
Hemingway, Ernest, 13-14, 33, 44, 45, 51, Mailer, Norman, 37
105, 117, 145; A Farewell to Arms, 13- Malraux, Andre, 9, 113, 114, 117, 152,
14, 43, 45, 51; The Old Man and the 153-154; Man's Fate, 113; The Voices
Sea, 145; The Sun Also Rises, 13, 44, 51 of Silence, 9
Huxley, Aldous, 29, 52, 72; After Many a Mann, Thomas, 107; The Magic Mountain,
Summer, 52, 72; Antic Hay, 72; Brave 101, 107, 111
New lJ7orld, 29; Point Counter Point, 72; Mannix, Edward, An End to Fury, 109
Time Must Have a Stop, 52, 72 Manuel, Frank E., The Eighteenth Century
Huxley, T. H., 38 Confronts the Gods, 144n.
INDEX 161
Marcel, Gabriel, The Mystery of Being, 29- 151; The Age of Reason, 30-31; Being
30 and Nothingness, 30, 114; The Devil and
Maritain Jacques, Art and Faith, 156; Art the Good Lord, 143; The Flies, 32, 143;
and Scholasticism, 68 Nausea, 108; The Reprieve, 31
Mauriac, Fran~ois, 72-73, 112, 115, 116, Schopenhauer, Arthur, 107, 140
123, 144, 156; Therese, 115 Scott, Nathan A., The Tragic Vision and
Melville, Herman, 100, 110; Moby Dick, the Christian Faith, 121n.
155 Self in Modern Literature, The, 98n.
Meredith, George, Modern Love, 44 Shakespeare, William, 25, 40
Mesnet, Maria-Beatrice, Graham Greene and Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 10; Prometheus Un-
the Heart of the Matter, 135 bound,7
Miller, Arthur, Death of a Salesman, 90 Sokel, Walter H., The Writer in Extre-
Morse, J. Mitchell, The Sympathetic Alien, mis, 25
47 Sophocles, 25
Murdoch, Iris, Sartre, 30n. Spencer, Herbert, 38
Stewart, Randall, American Literature and
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4, 5, 6, 10, 18, 19,
the Christian Doctrine, 120
33, 35, 38, 42, 53, 64-66, 69, 70, 71, 88,
Stratford, Philip, Faith and Fiction, 137n.
93, 94, 107, 117, 118, 122, 139, 140,
Swander, Homer, Franz Kafka Today, 22n.
151, 155, 157; The Birth of Tragedy, 4,
64-66,69; Ecce Homo, 38; The Genealo- Thody, Philip, 13n., 143n.
gy of orals, 93-94; Joyful Wisdom, 37; Thomas, Dylan, 9-10
The Twilight of the Idols, 144 Thomson, Patricia, The Victorian Heroine,
Nihilism, 19, 20, 22, 24, 28, 32, 33, 34, 44n.
35, 64-70, 73, 80, 87, 91, 98, 99, 107, Tillich, Paul, 15-16, 99, 144, 152, 154;
139, 154 The Protestant Era, 154; Theology of
Nott, Kathleen, The Emperor's Clothes, Culture, 15, 144; "The Word of God,"
137 99n.
O'Faolain, Sean, 123, 137; The Vanishing Tiverton, Father William, D. H. Lawrence
Hero, 137 and Human Existence, 118n.
O'Neill, Eugene, 25, 49-50, 145-146; Todd, John M., The Arts, Artists and Thin-
Days Without End, 50, 145-146; Dyna- kers, 116n.
mo, 50; Strange Interlude, 50-51; Wel- Tolstoy, Leo, 72, 100; Anna Karenina, 72;
ded, 50 Resurrection, 117; War and Peace, 72,
Orwell, George, 28-29, 119; Nineteen 101, 106
Eighty-Four, 28; Such, Such Were the Tyndall, John, 38
Joys, 28
Waggoner, Hyatt Howe, 121
Pascal, Blaise, 17-18, 91 Watts, Harold H., Hound and Quarry, 66
Pater, Walter, The Renaissance, 58 Weisinger, Herbert, Tragedy and the Pa-
Poggioli, Renato, The Phoenix and the Spi- radox of the Fortunate Fall, 142-143
der, 41, 86 Wells, H. G., 11
Proust, Marcel, 26, 129 Whalley, George, Poetic Process, 57, 58
White, Antonia, "The Novelist," 116
Read, Herbert, 153 Wimsatt, William K., Literary Criticism,
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 156
60n.
Rosanov, Vasili, 41-42, 49; Solitaria, 41 Woolf, Virginia, Mrs. Dal/oway, 90
Santayana, George, Interpretations of Poetry
and Religion, 41 Yeats, William Butler, 19, 67, 156; The
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 7-8, 23, 30-32, 39, 53, Autobiography of William Butler Yeats,
88, 108-109, 113, 117, 143, 145, 150, 67

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MODERN LITERATURE AND THE DEATH

THE HAGUE / MAR TINUS NIJHOFF /1966

Some of the material in this volume originally appeared as articles: "To

PART 1. THE LOSS OF FAITH

PART II. THE SEARCH FOR GOD

THE LOSS OF FAITH

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, quoted in

MODERN LITERATURE AND THE DEATH

century biological science projected was utterly indifferent to the

Having caught a glimpse of the night of nothingness which swal·

to produce "poems in praise of God's world by a man who doesn't be-

In this perceptive analysis of the spiritual dilemma of the modern

alley in which a number of writers are caught. Like H. G. Wells, the

his mind is supersaturated with the religion in which he says he dis-

Camus is nevertheless a "religious" writer 20 in his search for an

Alone in the time-space continuum he knows now of a certainty that

begin with radically different premises, arrive at substantially the same

GOD AND THE ALIENATED SELF

1. THE lOSS OF FAITH

The progressive loss of the religious consciousness, the growing

reduced to the coordinates of reason and the mandates of the moral

his spiritual dereliction, without any firm attachment to life or belief

cosmos that baffles his understanding. He is terrified by the thought

dence, was a conception alien to a social order which reduced people

Independently of Heidegger, Kafka in Prague, who had more in

It is a self that is rootless, homeless, dismayed in a universe that is

wish to explore the unplumbed, immeasurable depths of the self, which

3. ANDRE G IDE AND THE GRA TV I,TOV S ACT

tously," out of an impulse that cannot be controlled, without conscious

What is significant in this confession - and others very much like it

Here we can observe the complex process of the disintegration of the

the "acte gratuit," which involved him in a conception of God that

4. MOD ERN MAN INS EAR C H 0 F HIS LOS T S ELF

This is the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four made real. In an age of

possibility, and the self is transformed into a meaningless abstraction.

apart from the 'exist'." 10 There is the immediacy of self-awareness.

10 Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being. Translated by G. S. Fraser. Chicago: 1950,

adduce no reasons for acting in a given manner, and he cannot yield to

and proves disenchanting. Sartre, like Camus, unflinchingly discloses

5. THE ABSURD SELF

In a purely secular world, its framework of meaning relativized, the

6. THE F L I G H T FRO M S ELF I NTH E W 0 R L D 0 F

The Hemingway hero suffered a "wound," but he was borne up by a

EROS AND THE DEATH OF GOD

That is how Nietzsche violently attacked the regnant Pauline code of

fecundation - it arouses disgust because it is made only in being

Rozanov recognizes his fate as a stranger on earth, a predestined victim

In order to achieve this startling reversal of values, Rozanov - how

But the twentieth-century heroine who commits adultery wears no

Naturalis rather than Venus Coelestis, they are obsessed, often

for being, do not include any principle of transcendence in their reading

Though he has ceased to worship the God of his fathers, he continues

30 Matthew Arnold, "Rugby Chapel."

THE SEARCH FOR GOD

KIERKEGAARD AND NIETZSCHE

Of late a movement has sprung up which seeks to utilize the intuitions

Strange doctrine, indeed! Is the art of poetry to be judged by a series of

4 Soren Kierkegaard. Concludirl/? Unscientific Postscript. Translated by David F.