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Theological Amnesia: dreaming a book to write in my dotage

Using Clive James’s book as a springboard for imagining a similar volume dedicated to theological themes and writers from the twentieth century.

I remain enamored with Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia.

By way of reminder, it’s an 850-page encyclopedia of twentieth century European letters, life, politics, and war, with diversions into Asia and the Americas as the occasion demands. It’s organized as a series of short essays on 112 writers, artists, musicians, dancers, comedians, actors, directors, generals, and politicians, ordered alphabetically by surname. There are maybe one or two dozen figures who antedate the twentieth century, mostly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Tacitus is premodern; I can’t recall if there is another). James selects the names entirely by personal preference, affection, and the importance he deems their role in the times—whether or not that importance is recognized by others. Most of the chapters are love letters: he wants his readers to love what he loves. But not all of them; Mao, Hitler, and Goebbels have entries, as do Sartre, Benjamin, Brasillach, and Kollantai. He despises them all. Another goal, then, is for readers to learn to hate what he hates, and why.

The themes of the work cluster around the twin disasters of Nazism and Stalinism, which is to say, the prelude to World War II, the nightmare of the Final Solution, and their contested half-lives in the Cold War. James celebrates the fragility and triumph of liberalism over communism and fascism. For “liberalism” read “humanism.” He wants his readers, whom he imagines as students, not to succumb to the forgetfulness so common to liberal cultures. Amnesia, in his view, is the precondition for political tragedy, because it makes the poison of ideology go down less noticeably. Memory is the antidote, necessary if not sufficient.

I noted in a previous post that, if all you had was James’s book, you would think religion was a failed experiment, universally accepted and proclaimed as such by World War I at the latest. He includes no explicitly religious writers and only a handful of Christians, whose faith, as he sees it, is utterly incidental to the value of their thought or the quality of their writing.

Although not all his subjects are writers, it is writing in which he is principally interested. This is a book about style: James admires no one whose prose lacks grace or verve; a unique voice on the page covers a multitude of sins. Each entry begins with a brief autobiographical introduction, then an epigraph from the artist, then an essay to match it. The essay is free to go in any direction it pleases, which sometimes means it isn’t about the name at the head of the chapter at all. But it is never off topic and never not a pleasure to read. That’s how he gets away with it. The book is a monument to his own vanity, and yet he pulls it off anyway.

Given how deeply personal such an endeavor must have been for James, I find myself imagining, as I come to the book’s close (I have around twenty chapters to go), what another version would look like. Scratch that: I wonder what my version would look like. It goes without saying that I could never write a book one tenth as good as this one. And for erudition and scope, only someone like David Bentley Hart could manage writing the book as it exists in my imagination.

That said, I can’t stop thinking about it.

Suppose the parameters were the same: An alphabetized encyclopedia of the century just past, centered on and after World War II, featuring mini-essays on more than a hundred authors, artists, and public figures, selected by whimsy and pleasure but centered around a determinate set of themes that would emerge organically as readers moved from name to name in a kind of spiral or web. But suppose, in addition, that the goal was to highlight religion, in particular Christian life and thought, in a supposedly secular century. Suppose, too, that the center of gravity moved across the Atlantic to North America, and instead of comedy, ballet, and journalism, attention was paid to film, sports, and philosophy. James’s interest in the lost world of prewar Vienna would be transmuted into contemplating the legacy of the American West and the subsequent export of American culture to the world. Further themes would announce themselves: the problem of atheism; the boredom of secularism; the rise of Islam; the irrelevance of public theology; the return of the convert; the renewal of monasticism; and the modern martyr, in all its varieties.

The secret of James’s selectivity is that, in considering only some, he sneaks in all the rest. He has no entries on Kant, Pound, Joyce, Auden, Berlin, Eliot, Heidegger, Solzhenitsyn, Costa-Gravas, Kissinger, Einstein, Shakespeare, Dickens, Stalin, Lenin, or Orwell, but look in the Index, and you’ll see plenty of page numbers for each of them. He makes no apologies for whom he does and does not include, since a potted history is the only possibility for a personal literary breviary such as this one. He’s certainly not choosing for race, gender, nationality, or ideological bona fides. Remember: this is a catalogues of his loves, together with a few of his hatreds, presented (with a straight face and tongue in cheek, neither somehow canceling out the other) as what’s worth remembering from the most violent century in human history.

If you don’t share my reaction—that the world needs more books like this one—I don’t know what to tell you. If you do share my reaction, read on.

*

The title of my imaginary book, naturally enough, is Theological Amnesia. It’s an antidote to an antidote. James has forgotten faith: not his own, but others’. It didn’t go underground. It was never relegated to the private sphere. He and his ilk just chose to ignore it, and given the genuine changes in Western societies since the Enlightenment, they could afford to do so. They did so, however, at their peril.

Two subtitles are competing in my mind: Authors and Artists from a Long Secular Century vs. Authors and Artists from the Long American Century. The former is clearer, in its irony, about the book’s subtheme, whereas the latter foregrounds the cultural focus. (Now I’m wondering whether I should add mention of martyrs, saints, and others besides. Hm.)

Either way, that’s the pitch. Below are the names.

A few words of explanation. First, the number ballooned from 112 to 150. That was only after nixing an additional 150. I do not know how James did it. It’s an impossible choice.

Second, I justified the larger number—for, I remind myself and you, dear reader, my completely imaginary book—by recourse to James’s word count. While some essays are 4-6 pages, many are 8-12 pages, and some are much more than that. All in all, his book totals around 350,000 words. If I wrote an average 2,200 words per entry, even with 150 names that would make for a smaller book than James’s. In the alternate universe where a more learned variant of myself attempts to write this book in my 70s … a publisher definitely goes for it. Right? (Let me have this.)

Third and finally, I did my best to keep to James’s temporal center of gravity. No one on my list is born after the mid-1950s, and any of them who are still alive today (a) are approaching their ninth or tenth decade of life and (b) became famous, having done their most important and influential work, in the closing decades of the last century. Everyone else on the list lived and wrote between the Great War and the fall of the Soviet Union—except, that is, for the handful of premodern authors (five or six) and figures from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (maybe a dozen) whom I felt compelled to include.

Without further adieu, then, here is the fake table of contents for my imaginary book. If I live long enough to be an emeritus professor, full of leisure time and surrounded by scores of grandchildren, don’t be surprised when I self-publish a thousand-page version of this idea, with copies distributed to friends and family only. I’ll leave it to history to decide whether it’s an unheralded classic or a painful exercise in imitation gone awry.

Theological Amnesia: Writers and Thinkers, Saints and Martyrs from a Long Secular Century

  1. Thomas J. J. Altizer

  2. G. E. M. Anscombe

  3. Hannah Arendt

  4. W. H. Auden

  5. Augustine of Hippo

  6. Jane Austen

  7. James Baldwin

  8. J. G. Ballard

  9. Hans Urs von Balthasar

  10. Karl Barth

  11. Saul Bellow

  12. Isaiah Berlin

  13. Georges Bernanos

  14. Wendell Berry

  15. Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  16. Jorge Luis Borges

  17. Peter Brown

  18. Sergei Bulgakov

  19. Roberto Calasso

  20. John Calvin

  21. Albert Camus

  22. John le Carré

  23. G. K. Chesterton

  24. J. M. Coetzee

  25. James Cone

  26. Christopher Dawson

  27. Dorothy Day

  28. Simone de Beauvoir

  29. Henri de Lubac

  30. Augusto del Noce

  31. Charles Dickens

  32. Annie Dillard

  33. Walt Disney

  34. Fyodor Dostoevsky

  35. Frederick Douglass

  36. Clint Eastwood

  37. T. S. Eliot

  38. Frantz Fanon

  39. Patrick Leigh Fermor

  40. Ludwig Feuerbach

  41. John Ford

  42. Michel Foucault

  43. Sigmund Freud

  44. Mahātmā Gandhi

  45. Billy Graham

  46. Graham Greene

  47. Ursula K. le Guin

  48. Adolf von Harnack

  49. Martin Heidegger

  50. George Herbert

  51. Abraham Joshua Heschel

  52. Alfred Hitchcock

  53. Gerard Manley Hopkins

  54. Michel Houellebecq

  55. Aldous Huxley

  56. Ivan Illich

  57. P. D. James

  58. William James

  59. Robert Jenson

  60. Tony Judt

  61. Franz Kafka

  62. Søren Kierkegaard

  63. Martin Luther King Jr.

  64. Stephen King

  65. Ronald Knox

  66. Leszek Kołakowski

  67. Stanley Kubrick

  68. Akira Kurosawa

  69. Christopher Lasch

  70. Stan Lee

  71. Denise Levertov

  72. C. S. Lewis

  73. George Lucas

  74. John Lukacs

  75. Martin Luther

  76. Dwight Macdonald

  77. Alasdair MacIntyre

  78. Malcolm X

  79. Terrence Malick

  80. Jacques Maritain

  81. François Mauriac

  82. Cormac McCarthy

  83. Larry McMurtry

  84. Herman Melville

  85. H. L. Mencken

  86. Thomas Merton

  87. Mary Midgley

  88. Czesław Miłosz

  89. Hayao Miyazaki

  90. Malcolm Muggeridge

  91. Albert Murray

  92. Les Murray

  93. John Henry Newman

  94. H. Richard Niebuhr

  95. Reinhold Niebuhr

  96. Friedrich Nietzsche

  97. Flannery O’Connor

  98. Robert Oppenheimer

  99. George Orwell

  100. Yasujirō Ozu

  101. Blaise Pascal

  102. Paul of Tarsus

  103. Walker Percy

  104. Karl Popper

  105. Neil Postman

  106. Thomas Pynchon

  107. Sayyid Qutb

  108. Joseph Ratzinger

  109. Marilynne Robinson

  110. Fred Rogers

  111. Franz Rosenzweig

  112. Salman Rushdie

  113. John Ruskin

  114. Bill Russell

  115. Edward Said

  116. Margaret Sanger

  117. Dorothy Sayers

  118. Paul Schrader

  119. George Scialabba

  120. Martin Scorsese

  121. Roger Scruton

  122. Peter Singer

  123. Maria Skobtsova

  124. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  125. Sophrony the Athonite

  126. Wole Soyinka

  127. Steven Spielberg

  128. Wallace Stegner

  129. Edith Stein

  130. Leo Strauss

  131. Preston Sturges

  132. Andrei Tartovsky

  133. Charles Taylor

  134. Mother Teresa

  135. Thérèse of Lisieux

  136. Thomas Aquinas

  137. R. S. Thomas

  138. J. R. R. Tolkien

  139. John Kennedy Toole

  140. Desmond Tutu

  141. John Updike

  142. Sigrid Undset

  143. Evelyn Waugh

  144. Simone Weil

  145. H. G. Wells

  146. Rebecca West

  147. Oprah Winfrey

  148. Ludwig Wittgenstein

  149. Karol Wojtyła

  150. Franz Wright

*

Update (8/2): I should have thought to include a list of James’s entries, so that those unfamiliar with the book could see the names he chose, as well as compare them with mine. Apparently his list comes only to 106, not 112; perhaps I came to that number by counting the introductory and concluding essays. In any case, here you go:

  1. Anna Akhmatova

  2. Peter Altenberg

  3. Louis Armstrong

  4. Raymond Aron

  5. Walter Benjamin

  6. Marc Bloch

  7. Jorge Luis Borges

  8. Robert Brasillach

  9. Sir Thomas Browne

  10. Albert Camus

  11. Dick Cavett

  12. Paul Celan

  13. Chamfort

  14. Coco Chanel

  15. Charles Chaplin

  16. Nirad C. Chaudhuri

  17. G. K. Chesterton

  18. Jean Cocteau

  19. Gianfranco Contini

  20. Benedetto Croce

  21. Tony Curtis

  22. Ernst Robert Curtius

  23. Miles Davis

  24. Sergei Diaghilev

  25. Pierre Drieu La Rochelle

  26. Alfred Einstein

  27. Duke Ellington

  28. Federico Fellini

  29. W. C. Fields

  30. F. Scott Fitzgerald

  31. Gustave Flaubert

  32. Sigmund Freud

  33. Egon Friedell

  34. François Furet

  35. Charles de Gaulle

  36. Edward Gibbon

  37. Terry Gilliam

  38. Joseph Goebbels

  39. Witold Gombrowicz

  40. William Hazlitt

  41. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  42. Heinrich Heine

  43. Adolf Hitler

  44. Ricarda Huch

  45. Ernst Jünger

  46. Franz Kafka

  47. John Keats

  48. Leszek Kołakowski

  49. Alexandra Kollontai

  50. Heda Margolius Kovály

  51. Karl Kraus

  52. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  53. Norman Mailer

  54. Nadezhda Mandelstam

  55. Golo Mann

  56. Heinrich Mann

  57. Michael Mann

  58. Thomas Mann

  59. Mao Zedong

  60. Chris Marker

  61. John McCloy

  62. Zinka Milanov

  63. Czesław Miłosz

  64. Eugenio Montale

  65. Montesquieu

  66. Alan Moorehead

  67. Paul Muratov

  68. Lewis Namier

  69. Grigory Ordzhonokidze

  70. Octavio Paz

  71. Alfred Polgar

  72. Beatrix Potter

  73. Jean Prévost

  74. Marcel Proust

  75. Edgar Quinet

  76. Marcel Reich-Ranicki

  77. Jean-François Revel

  78. Richard Rhodes

  79. Rainer Maria Rilke

  80. Virginio Rognoni

  81. Ernesto Sabato

  82. Edward Said

  83. Sainte-Beuve

  84. José Saramago

  85. Jean-Paul Sartre

  86. Erik Satie

  87. Arthur Schnitzler

  88. Sophie Scholl

  89. Wolf Jobst Siedler

  90. Manès Sperber

  91. Tacitus

  92. Margaret Thatcher

  93. Henning von Tresckow

  94. Leon Trotsky

  95. Karl Tschuppik

  96. Dubravka Ugrešić

  97. Miguel de Unamuno

  98. Pedro Henríquez Ureña

  99. Paul Valéry

  100. Mario Vargas Llosa

  101. Evelyn Waugh

  102. Ludwig Wittgenstein

  103. Isoroku Yamamoto

  104. Aleksandr Zinoviev

  105. Carl Zuckmayer

  106. Stefan Zweig

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Brad East Brad East

Theological amnesia

A reflection on Clive James, literature, and theology.

It would be an understatement to say I’m taken with Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time. I’m positively obsessed. I’ve never read anything like it. I’m smitten with the prose and gobsmacked by the coverage. The man has read everything, or at least he makes me feel like I’ve read next to nothing.

One thing he hasn’t read, though, is theology. You might even say he hasn’t read Christians. Of the more than 100 authors and artists that he canvasses, mostly from the twentieth century, maybe five are religious, and their religion is not, in his view, part of their genius. Sure, he likes Chesterton and Waugh and Kołakowski. But those exceptions prove the rule. James cares (cared—he passed away at 80 the same month the first Covid cases began appearing in Wuhan, quite a time to lose such a vital voice in politics and culture) about influence, stature, prestige, literature, artistry, and above these and all else two things: style on the page and wisdom in the world. The latter, to James, meant a rejection of ideology—in twentieth century garb, fascism and communism in equal parts—without apology or compromise. He was a pure product of the postwar period; his heroes were the post-Left French who suffered for their apostasies, like Aron and Furet and Revel. He was right to honor them.

Right, I say, in what he honored, but wrong in what he ignored. Even on his own terms, James should have read, memorialized, and found profit in Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Maritain, Eliot, Belloc, Knox, Greene, Undset, Bonhoeffer, Barth, Weil, Mauriac, Bernanos, de Lubac, Auden, Lewis, Tolkien, Fermor, Solzhenitsyn, Ratzinger, Percy, Illich, Berry, MacIntyre, Taylor, Levertov, and so many others. Instead, it’s as if religion in any form except the severely private disappears from the world by the end of the long nineteenth century. You certainly wouldn’t know that theists of any kind put pen to page in the twentieth, much less that it was good, sometimes, and that their words and deeds regularly made a difference on the public stage.

A writer like James, for all his erudition, has amnesia of his own, both in the immediate past and in the distant past. It’s a deficit common to most of his peers: highbrow journalists and elite critics who can’t bother to glance in the direction of the pious (at least, not without cringing). The deficit may be understandable, but it’s not defensible. It renders all that they write incomplete from the outset, by definition. Not just their knowledge but their love is circumscribed artificially by choice, and this alienates them from every human culture of which we have evidence. At one point James comments that humans wrote poetry before prose, spoke before they wrote, and sang before they spoke in sentences. He leaves the observation there, hanging, but he should have known better. After all, what did humans do both before and by means of song and speech and poetry and prose?

They prayed. Let the reader understand.

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Brad East Brad East

John Lukacs on what makes history

"This short history of the twentieth century is not a philosophical treatise. But at this point I am compelled to add two brief digressions. The first is a summary of my view of history, which goes contrary to the still very widely accepted categorical beliefs of why and how history happened and happens, of course including that of the Second World War. The current, often deemed 'scientific' belief is that history, perhaps especially in the democratic age, is the result of great material and economic factors, of which the lives, acts, and thoughts of people are largely the consequences. That is less than a half-truth. In 1933, Hitler came to power in Germany not just because of the economic crisis of 1930–1933, but because of the political mood of many Germans at that time. It was not the state of the British economy that made the British government reluctant to resist Hitler in the Thirties. It was not inferiority of materials or armaments that led to the collapse of France in 1940. There was no economic reason for the Japanese to plan and then make war on the United States. Of course, it is true that the tremendous material power of the United States (and the enormous size of the armies of the Soviet Union) made the war winnable against Germany and Japan. But there, too, what mattered was the resolution and the near-unanimity of the American people, and the unwillingness of the Russian people to oppose Stalin. What people thought (and think), what they believe, what they choose to think, what they prefer to believe—that is the main essence of their lives, of which their material conditions and economics desires are most often the outcomes, and not the other way around."

—John Lukacs, A Short History of the Twentieth Century (Belknap, 2013), 126-127. Lukacs, who will be 95 in January, was born in Hungary to a Jewish mother and a Roman Catholic father. Since the 1940s, he has lived in the United States and taught and written as a historian. Much of what he writes in this brief but enthralling book he lived through himself—sometimes up close. There is nothing quite like reading a truly independent mind, as evidenced in the quote above. As it happens, to make an odd comparison between two authors, I am currently reading Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, whose founding premise is the idea of "psycho-history," what Asimov calls "the quintessence of sociology." By its precise mathematical formulas, it can predict (in the novel) what will happen hundreds and thousands of years in the future, treating masses of human beings the way scientists treat elements and atoms. Lukacs, for his part, stands against the materialists and the determinists alike. It's a breath of fresh air.
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