Category: Green, Julien

Andre Gide: Evangelical Atheist

Julian Green, Diary 1928-1957, an excerpt from the entry of 24 March 1951, p. 243:

Since my return to France in 1945, I never had an opportunity of  seeing Gide without his attempting, one way or the other, to aim a blow at my [Roman Catholic] faith. [. . .] It would be understanding him very badly to say that he played the part of Satan. Quite the contrary, his purpose was to save me. He wanted to win me over to unbelief and exerted all the zeal of a Christian trying to convince an infidel. That is what perturbed me. Any means seemed good to him in order to make me doubt, because that was the price of salvation. And what was religious in him lent a particular form to his atheism, and to his nonbelief the aspect of a religion. On the other hand, his extraordinary intuition of human beings allowed him to sense how much I was upset by our talks on Catholicism, no matter what pains I took to hide my state of mind. I sometimes eluded this trying subject; he brought me back to it, gently, firmly, with the obstinacy of a missionary.  Finally, he realized he was wasting his time (I could no more fall back than a man with a wall behind him), but he never quite gave up trying to convert me, and did so visibly for conscience’ sake and sometimes against his will.

I find Gide’s evangelically atheist attitude exceedingly strange. What was Gide trying to save Green from? Error? Being wrong? Surely not from  perdition! Perhaps Gide was trying to save Green from anxiety in this life over whether he would end up in hell in the next. But I see no evidence of this in Gide.

And what was Gide trying to convert Green to? The truth? That would make Gide a proselyte for the truth when Gide was opposed to the proselytic mentality. He didn’t like it when Paul Claudel, who presumed to be in firm possession of the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, tried to bring Gide into the Roman Catholic fold.

If Gide did not like people trying to convert him to what they took to be true for his own good, how could he, consistently with that dislike, aim to convert people like Green to what he, Gide, took to be true, namely, that there is no God, no soul, no higher purpose to human existence, no ultimate justice for the countless victims of injustice, no final succor or salvation from our earthly predicament? Claudel was sincerely concerned about Gide’s spiritual welfare.  Given what Gide believed, could he be concerned with Green’s spiritual welfare?

And how could Gide be so cocksure that he had the truth? Giben that he was skeptical of Green’s belief, why wasn’t he also skeptical of his own disbelief?

The deepest issue here, it seems to me, is the question of the value of truth.  Is it good for us to know the truth, or would it be better for us not to know the truth?  You might respond that it depends on what the truth is.  If the truth is that we will can look forward to a blissful eternity, then that is a truth it would be good to know. But if the truth is that we will shortly be worm fodder, then that is a truth it would not be good to know.

To respond in this way, however, would show a failure to understand the question.  The question is whether truth, whatever it is, is a value. Value for whom? For us. So the question is whether the truth would be good for us know.

Truth is one thing, its value another.  If you have the truth, then you are in touch with the way things are, whether partially or completely.  One way of being in touch is by knowing how things stand in reality.  Another is by believing truly how things stand in reality, where to believe truly is to have a true belief.   Knowing and believing truly are not the same but they can be subsumed under the rubric  reality-contact. Either way one is in contact with reality. But is it good for us to be in contact with the way things are? Will this contact contribute to our flourishing, our living well, our being happy on balance and in the long run? To say yes is to say that truth, or rather contact with reality whether via knowledge or belief,  is a value, a good thing.

Gide’s attitude seems to be that the truth is the supreme value whether or not it is good for us to know it. The opposite attitude is that of William James who maintained that the true is the good by way of belief.

But now we are in deep. Time to rustle up some vittles for the evening’s repast before Mark Levin comes on.  There’s more to life than philosophy. There’s politics!

An Augustinian Argument against Suicide

Examined and rejected. Top o’ the Stack.

Facebook advertisement: “Mercifully brief, perfectly rigorous, and indisputably sound.”   I wouldn’t promote it that way here, of course.

Contemplating suicide?  Look before you leap.

Julian Green, Diary 1928-1957, p. 230:

The yearning to leave the world is so strong at times that I don’t know how to resist it, but am nearly sure that this is the great temptation that must at all costs be warded off.

The Proselytic Mentality

On occasion we encounter morally good people who are sincerely interested in our spiritual welfare, so much so that they fear that we will be lost if we differ from the views they cherish, even if our views are not so very different from theirs.  Julian Green in his Diary 1928-1957, entry of 10 April 1929, p. 6, said to André Gide:

With the best will in the world, they never see you without a lurking idea of proselytism. They are worried about our salvation.  They visibly have it on their minds., even when you talk to them of quite different matters. . . .  “Yes indeed!” cries Gide. “They will use every means to draw you to them. When you are with them you find yourself in the situation of a woman faced with a man who would harbor intentions!”

I’d guess the alacrity and enthusiasm of Gide’s response to Green had its origin in Gide’s relation to Paul Claudel, a committed Roman Catholic who never ceased trying to bring Gide around to the true faith. The Claudel-Gide correspondence 1899-1926 makes for fascinating reading.

What I find objectionable about the proselytic mentality is the cocksurety with which the proselytes hold their views.  They dogmatically affirm this and they dogmatically deny that, and are not in the least troubled by the fact that people as intellectually and morally virtuous as they are disagree. They ‘know’ what salvation is and the way to it.  The critical attitude is foreign to them. The fervor of their beliefs boils over into something they wrongly consider knowledge.

Their attitude is mostly harmless, but there are toxic forms of it, as history has taught us. The Founders of our great republic were well aware of the religious wars and of the blood shed by the dogmatists. These days it is the spikes of the Islamic trident that are a clear and present threat: conversion, dhimmitude, the sword. The ascension of a madman to the mayoralty in our greatest city is a troubling sign.

Julian Green on Manna

Diary 1928-1957, entry of 6 October 1941:

The story of the manna gathered and set aside by the Hebrews is deeply significant. It so happened that the manna rotted when it was kept. And perhaps that means that all spiritual reading which is not consumed — by prayer and by works — ends by causing a sort of rotting inside us. You die with a head full of fine sayings and a perfectly empty heart.

The consumption of a comestible is its physiological appropriation. To appropriate is to make one’s own. Green is referring to spiritual appropriation, the making one’s own of spiritual sayings by prayer and practice.

Did edible bread once fall from the sky? I don’t deny it, but must I affirm it? Would it not be enough to take the Old Testament passage in its spiritual sense and bracket the question of its literal truth?

 

Two Types of Humanity: The Mystic and the Profligate

Julian Green, Diary 1928-1957, entry of 30 December 1940, p. 104:

Does our body never weary of desiring the same things? [. . .] There are only two types of humanity . . . the mystic and the profligate, because both fly to extremes , searching, each is his own way, for the absolute;  but, of the two, the profligate is to my mind the most [more] mysterious, for he never tires of the only dish served up to him by his appetite and on which he banquets each times as though he had never tasted it before. Probably because of this, I have always had a tendency to consider an immoderate craving for pleasure as an accepted form of madness.

Only two types of humanity? No, but two types. Man is made for the Absolute, and some of us seek it.  Mysticism and profligacy are two ways of seeking it. Eschewing the phony and conventional, some of us strive after the really real, τὸ ὄντως ὄν.   Some by world-flight, others by immersion in sensual indulgence.  An enlightened upward and a deluded downward seeking.  The solid and stolid bourgeois type will consider both types of seekers mad. But only those who seek the really real in the pleasures of the flesh are truly mad.  They are bound for a hell of their own devising as I suggest in A Theory of Hell. Excerpt:

To be in hell is to be in a perpetual state of enslavement to one's vices, knowing that one is enslaved, unable to derive genuine satisfaction from them, unable to get free, and knowing that there is true happiness that will remain forever out of reach. Hell would then be not as a state of pain but one of endless unsatisfying and unsatisfied pleasure. A state of unending gluttony for example, or of ceaseless sexual  promiscuity. A state of permanent entrapment in a fool's paradise —  think of an infernal counterpart of Las Vegas — in which one is constantly lusting after food and drink and money and sex, but is never satisfied. On fire with the fire of desire, endless and unfulfilled, but with the clear understanding that one is indeed a fool, and entrapped, and cut off permanently from a genuine happiness that one knows exists but will never experience.