Theological Amnesia: dreaming a book to write in my dotage
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
Thomas J. J. Altizer
G. E. M. Anscombe
Hannah Arendt
W. H. Auden
Augustine of Hippo
Jane Austen
James Baldwin
J. G. Ballard
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Karl Barth
Saul Bellow
Isaiah Berlin
Georges Bernanos
Wendell Berry
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Jorge Luis Borges
Peter Brown
Sergei Bulgakov
Roberto Calasso
John Calvin
Albert Camus
John le Carré
G. K. Chesterton
J. M. Coetzee
James Cone
Christopher Dawson
Dorothy Day
Simone de Beauvoir
Henri de Lubac
Augusto del Noce
Charles Dickens
Annie Dillard
Walt Disney
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Frederick Douglass
Clint Eastwood
T. S. Eliot
Frantz Fanon
Patrick Leigh Fermor
Ludwig Feuerbach
John Ford
Michel Foucault
Sigmund Freud
Mahātmā Gandhi
Billy Graham
Graham Greene
Ursula K. le Guin
Adolf von Harnack
Martin Heidegger
George Herbert
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Alfred Hitchcock
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Michel Houellebecq
Aldous Huxley
Ivan Illich
P. D. James
William James
Robert Jenson
Tony Judt
Franz Kafka
Søren Kierkegaard
Martin Luther King Jr.
Stephen King
Ronald Knox
Leszek Kołakowski
Stanley Kubrick
Akira Kurosawa
Christopher Lasch
Stan Lee
Denise Levertov
C. S. Lewis
George Lucas
John Lukacs
Martin Luther
Dwight Macdonald
Alasdair MacIntyre
Malcolm X
Terrence Malick
Jacques Maritain
François Mauriac
Cormac McCarthy
Larry McMurtry
Herman Melville
H. L. Mencken
Thomas Merton
Mary Midgley
Czesław Miłosz
Hayao Miyazaki
Malcolm Muggeridge
Albert Murray
Les Murray
John Henry Newman
H. Richard Niebuhr
Reinhold Niebuhr
Friedrich Nietzsche
Flannery O’Connor
Robert Oppenheimer
George Orwell
Yasujirō Ozu
Blaise Pascal
Paul of Tarsus
Walker Percy
Karl Popper
Neil Postman
Thomas Pynchon
Sayyid Qutb
Joseph Ratzinger
Marilynne Robinson
Fred Rogers
Franz Rosenzweig
Salman Rushdie
John Ruskin
Bill Russell
Edward Said
Margaret Sanger
Dorothy Sayers
Paul Schrader
George Scialabba
Martin Scorsese
Roger Scruton
Peter Singer
Maria Skobtsova
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Sophrony the Athonite
Wole Soyinka
Steven Spielberg
Wallace Stegner
Edith Stein
Leo Strauss
Preston Sturges
Andrei Tartovsky
Charles Taylor
Mother Teresa
Thérèse of Lisieux
Thomas Aquinas
R. S. Thomas
J. R. R. Tolkien
John Kennedy Toole
Desmond Tutu
John Updike
Sigrid Undset
Evelyn Waugh
Simone Weil
H. G. Wells
Rebecca West
Oprah Winfrey
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Karol Wojtyła
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:
Anna Akhmatova
Peter Altenberg
Louis Armstrong
Raymond Aron
Walter Benjamin
Marc Bloch
Jorge Luis Borges
Robert Brasillach
Sir Thomas Browne
Albert Camus
Dick Cavett
Paul Celan
Chamfort
Coco Chanel
Charles Chaplin
Nirad C. Chaudhuri
G. K. Chesterton
Jean Cocteau
Gianfranco Contini
Benedetto Croce
Tony Curtis
Ernst Robert Curtius
Miles Davis
Sergei Diaghilev
Pierre Drieu La Rochelle
Alfred Einstein
Duke Ellington
Federico Fellini
W. C. Fields
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Gustave Flaubert
Sigmund Freud
Egon Friedell
François Furet
Charles de Gaulle
Edward Gibbon
Terry Gilliam
Joseph Goebbels
Witold Gombrowicz
William Hazlitt
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Heinrich Heine
Adolf Hitler
Ricarda Huch
Ernst Jünger
Franz Kafka
John Keats
Leszek Kołakowski
Alexandra Kollontai
Heda Margolius Kovály
Karl Kraus
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Norman Mailer
Nadezhda Mandelstam
Golo Mann
Heinrich Mann
Michael Mann
Thomas Mann
Mao Zedong
Chris Marker
John McCloy
Zinka Milanov
Czesław Miłosz
Eugenio Montale
Montesquieu
Alan Moorehead
Paul Muratov
Lewis Namier
Grigory Ordzhonokidze
Octavio Paz
Alfred Polgar
Beatrix Potter
Jean Prévost
Marcel Proust
Edgar Quinet
Marcel Reich-Ranicki
Jean-François Revel
Richard Rhodes
Rainer Maria Rilke
Virginio Rognoni
Ernesto Sabato
Edward Said
Sainte-Beuve
José Saramago
Jean-Paul Sartre
Erik Satie
Arthur Schnitzler
Sophie Scholl
Wolf Jobst Siedler
Manès Sperber
Tacitus
Margaret Thatcher
Henning von Tresckow
Leon Trotsky
Karl Tschuppik
Dubravka Ugrešić
Miguel de Unamuno
Pedro Henríquez Ureña
Paul Valéry
Mario Vargas Llosa
Evelyn Waugh
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Isoroku Yamamoto
Aleksandr Zinoviev
Carl Zuckmayer
Stefan Zweig
