Secularism/Atheism/ Agnosticism

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR SECULARISM/ATHEISM/ AGNOSTICISM Vincent P. Pecora ecularism, atheism, and agnosticism belong to what Ludwig Wittgenstein called Sa “family” of ideas, yet are etymologically distinct. Two of the terms—agnosticism and secularism—are coinages of later nineteenth-century Britain, though their linguistic roots are much older. At least in Western Europe and Russia, the fi n de siècle produced a questioning of theism unlike anything that had come before. The dominant religious attitude among late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century intellectuals had been deism, the assumption that God existed but was absent from human affairs. Some deists could have been called atheists or agnostics, had the latter term been available. But deism covered, as it were, a multitude of sins between theism and atheism, and provided a useful way of avoiding deeper theological controversy. It was a perspective inspired by Galileo’s astronomy, Isaac Newton’s mechanics, the Reformation’s rejection of miracles and the papacy, and the acknowledgment after the voyages of discovery of a larger and less savage array of religious practices than anyone had previously imagined. Deism was the shared theology of the Enlightenment, from the Scottish sentimental moralists and French encyclopédistes to the American founders and the German Romantic philosophers. By contrast, the European nineteenth century unfolded in the idealistic but threatening shadow of the French Revolution, which was nothing if not virulently anti-clerical. Whether one celebrated its humanist, republican ideals with nationalist revolutionaries, or feared its anarchic violence, as did supporters of the old regimes, the French Revolution and Napoleon’s attempt at a new European order presaged a liberated and Promethean but also unregulated and disorderly future. Percy Bysshe Shelley updated Aeschylus in his Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts (1818–19), in which the phantasm of Jupiter invoked by the chained Prometheus rehearses Prometheus’s curse against his God. But thou who art the God and Lord—O thou Who fi llest with thy soul this world of woe, To whom all things of Earth and Heaven do bow In fear and worship—all-prevailing foe! I curse thee! Let a sufferer’s curse 537 — Vincent P. Pecora — Clasp thee, his torturer, like remorse, Till thine Infi nity shall be A robe of envenomed agony And thine Omnipotence a crown of pain To cling like burning gold round thy dissolving brain. (Prometheus Unbound, Act 1, ll. 282–91) Under the guise of pagan verse-theater, Shelley did not mince words. But the promise of Promethean revolution was its ability to overcome the limitations of fi ne art, social class, and political power in the pursuit of a world unfettered by Gods and monarchs alike. It is this Napoleonic/Promethean vision of a heroically anti- theistic and anti-authoritarian humanity that the nineteenth century inherited, and that gave its debates about divine authority the frisson of a struggle over social authority as well. ATHEISM Atheism today seems straightforward: evolution, atoms, DNA, but no God or supernatural realm. But this is too simplistic. The word in English dates back at least to the late sixteenth century, where it tended to mean “godless” or Epicurean. Mere fragments of the writings of Epicurus (341–270 bce) survive, but his name has long been associated with atomistic materialism. Yet his religious beliefs seem closer to that of eighteenth-century deists: Epicurus held that freedom from fear and pain was life’s goal, and that the gods did not interfere in mortal existence. In Paradise Lost (1667), John Milton refers to “the atheist crew” following Satan into battle against God’s angelic legions (Book VI, line 370), but Milton means something closer to impious or rebellious here. Satan obviously does not deny the existence of God; he wants to dethrone him. Atheism throughout the centuries actually pointed to a number of different epistemological and moral positions—neither Epicurus nor Milton’s Satan aligns neatly with, say, the seventeenth-century materialism of Thomas Hobbes or the libertinism of John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, though all four have been labeled atheists, and Rochester was quite vocal about his disbelief (despite his deathbed conversion). Like later nineteenth-century agnosticism, atheism implied both an epistemological position—there is neither evidence for a divinity nor any reason to assume one—and a moral position, summed up by several characters in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880): without God and immortality, Miusov observes, “everything would be permitted, even anthro- pophagy” (Dostoevsky 69). The nineteenth-century arguments about secularism, atheism, and agnosticism are often about the relation between belief and morality. Does the epistemological position necessarily entail the moral one (as Rochester’s death at 33, probably from venereal and kidney disease, implied to many) and as Dostoevsky assumed, or can one ignore the deity and still lead a virtuous, even admirable, life, a view held by Hobbes, most of the deists, and the majority of nineteenth-century atheists and agnostics? Three signifi cant versions of later nineteenth-century atheism deserve attention. Throughout the fl urry of debate and discussion over religion, two fi gures—one solidly on the political left, and one roughly on the political right—stand out as 538 — Secularism/atheism/agnosticism — exemplary atheists: Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche. Marx’s claim that religion was nothing more than the “opium of the people” resounds to this day, but his more far-reaching critique of religion appears in “On the Jewish Question” (1843) (see Marx, Critique 131). The latter essay responds to Bruno Bauer’s argument that neither Prussia nor any other Christian state could politically emancipate the Jews and survive. Bauer demanded the abolition of religion as a prerequisite to true political freedom. What is remarkable today is that neither Bauer nor Marx demonstrated any confi dence in what modern democracies call religious pluralism. Religion for Marx and Bauer was so identifi ed with a single national identity that neither believed a nation harboring competing religions could cohere. Bauer insisted that only the renunciation of religious belief could produce equality of political rights—an extension of French republicanism and of the Young Hegelian argument, elaborated by Ludwig Feuerbach, that religion was nothing more than human love mistakenly displaced into a non-human realm. Once the mistake was recognized, Feuerbach argued, religion as such would disappear and true human emancipation would occur. Against Bauer, Marx argued that religion would wither away of its own accord. Economic oppression and inequity drove individuals into the arms of religion searching for cosmic solace—the justice denied on earth was to be guaranteed in heaven—so that ending injustice would destroy the need for religion. Marx and Engels devoted a large part of The German Ideology (completed in 1846, though not published until 1932) toward illustrating how Feuerbach had put the cart before the horse. By making emancipation depend on the abandonment of religious belief, Feuerbach granted religion a causality it did not possess. “Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the ‘religious sentiment’ is itself a social product” rather than an element of some “human essence” (“Theses on Feuerbach,” nos. VII and VI; see Marx and Engels, German 122). With capitalism’s collapse, a new egalitarian society would no longer have any need for religious explanations or expectations. Marx did not assume that atheism itself had any social or epistemological effects; theism was simply an illusion that would evaporate when material inequality disappeared. Whatever one thinks of Marx’s economic program, it is certain that his arguments against religion have had a larger effect on the way intellectuals have approached belief after him than those of any other nineteenth-century thinker. Many liberals after Max Weber, and especially after the Great Depression, embraced Marx’s central point that religious belief and economic wellbeing were inversely proportional, no matter how skeptical they remained about communism. Christ’s “blessed are the meek” became sociological axiom, though not in the way Christ intended. For the sociologists, the meek had more need of faith. The mid-1960s brought the fl ourishing of the “secularization thesis”: the rise of economic, political, and social modernity, including nationalism and rationally administered capitalism, guaranteed the fall of religion, a conclusion borne out by empirical data at the time. Only in recent decades has the long association between the rise of economic modernity and the fall of religion come to be seriously questioned. Nietzsche’s critique of religion was more aggressive, if more ambitious and ambiguous, than Marx’s. But Nietzsche may be more representative of the decadence- cum-regeneration spirit of fi n-de-siècle culture. Nietzsche mounted a wholesale 539 — Vincent P. Pecora — attack not only on European Christianity and the Judaism from which it arose, but also on non-Western religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, all of which exemplifi ed “ascetic ideals”—that is, selfl essness, a hatred of the body and its desires, and a longing for release from the physical world (see Nietzsche, Genealogy, Third Essay). Priestly Christianity promoted this ascetic ideal to the wretched of the earth, convincing them of what was in their interest: the meek would one day inherit the earth and be avenged by divine triumph over their tormentors. Nietzsche claimed that this ascetic ideal led to Europe’s nineteenth-century nihilism and the catastrophe of egalitarian democracy and socialism. But the demise of European civilization was for him also a harbinger of cultural rebirth, with other forms of enchantment arising out of Europe’s destruction. Where Marx understood the birth and death of religion as necessary consequences of economic development, Nietzsche saw the emergence of Judaism and Christianity in antiquity as a grand historical detour, the growing implications of which had become intolerable in fi n-de-siècle Europe.

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