The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God by Peter Watson Read Free Book Online Page A

philosophy should attempt to retain a central concept”—the concept of transcendence. She was convinced that transcendence, “in some form or other,” belongs with morality, adding that we need to retain “a metaphysical position but no metaphysical form.” Above all, “the Good is certainly transcendent.”
    Looking around her, she felt compelled to say that “there is more than this,” and went on to plead that philosophers “try to invent a terminology which shows our natural psychology can be altered by conceptions which lie beyond its range . . . the Platonic metaphor of the Good provides a suitable picture here.” “God does not and cannot exist. But what led us to conceive him does exist and is constantly experienced and pictured. That is, it is real as an idea, and also incarnate in knowledge and work and love.” We can all receive moral help “by focusing our attention on things which are valuable: virtuous people, great art . . . the idea of Good itself.” Moreover, “Beauty is the visible and accessible aspect of the Good. The Good is not itself visible.”
    She is convinced that the Good finds “empirically discoverable” incarnation in great works of art. This contemplation, she says, is “an entry into (and not just an analogy of) the good life,” since it involves “the checking of selfishness in the interests of the real.” When we read Shakespeare or Tolstoy, two of her perennial favorites, “we learn something of the real quality of human nature . . . with a clarity which does not belong to the self-centered rush of ordinary life.” Murdoch says that art cannot be altered or possessed by us, and that in itself is liberating. And it is important because “[e]thics means the annihilation of self before the irreducibility of other people.” It is the serious and successful novel that can “deliver us from the tyranny of ourselves,” and this informs her criticism, too. T. S. Eliot, she says, doesn’t want us “to attend to other people”—he wishes us to attend to God. 8 In successful art, we contemplate in quietness something whose authority makes us unaware of ourselves. An artist is someone who lets others be through him.
    George Steiner’s well-stocked mind is everywhere evident in his work. He is a passionate worshipper of high art, in an old-fashioned way, as if from a time when high art really mattered. High-art names teem across his pages—Van Gogh and King Lear, Mondrian and Chartres Cathedral, Paul Valéry and Henry Moore—corralled passionately into the “speculative ordering” Steiner gives them. Though his books are ostensibly arguments or theories, as one critic said they are essentially statements of faith—Steiner wants high art to reclaim “its primary importance and its primal power.” 9 His essential argument is that the special place high art should have in the hierarchy of human activities is religious in nature: “great literature or painting or music are spiritual in their impulses, transcendent in their meanings, mysterious in their force.”
    In Steiner’s view, we are living, metaphorically, in the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, in effect a period of waiting between the death of God and his resurrection. Waiting and patience are part of the human condition, he says, for we have been waiting for centuries—for eons—for signs of God’s existence, and it is this waiting, this theological understanding of ourselves, without any certainty, that has given rise to our culture and is responsible for what we have achieved.
    Since Nietzsche announced the death of God, we have been living in a secondary world where art, with a few exceptions, has been taken over by journalism, by critics and the academy rather than by the artists themselves—worlds that are trivial, consumer-driven, in too much of a hurry (“Fashion is the motor of death”) or scholastic in the medieval sense of arguing over minute issues that scarcely