Theological amnesia
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.
