Anti-Climacus

I have mentioned a few times that A Burnt-Out Case is my favorite Graham Greene novel, and the only one that really holds up for me as a narrative. This is in no small part because it's the only novel in which he shows any real respect for non-religion: in all the other novels, the protagonist suffers from doubts over some variant of Catholicism but is eventually pulled back to his faith, or given a uncertain but hopeful possibility of redemption in the afterlife. It's a deck-stacking move that guts the narrative energy of his most important works, in that the resolution of the plot matters little: faith will always win out in the end. A Burnt-Out Case has the courage of its convictions, to show not one but two atheist characters who are rather better people, on the whole, than the religious ones--one of whom is atheist with no real second thoughts about it and the other is one who lost his faith and never found it again.

I particularly like it because the book ends with a priest and the stalwart atheist discussing their friend, the one who lost faith; their conversation addresses the priest's illogical attempts to rehabilitate the man who did not want it, and by proxy Greene's own tendency to stick his characters with faith whether deserved or not. The highlight of which is this line:

"How persistent you are, father. You never let anyone go, do you? You'd even like to claim Querry [the dead guy] for your own."

All of which seems apropos of Ross Douthat on Christopher Hitchens. After a perfunctory show of respect for Hitchens' atheism, Douthat goes on at some length about how inconceivable it was that someone who liked all the same books as him could not be a religious believer. It plays as tremendously disrespectful to the person it's supposed to be commemorating:

In his very brave and very public dying, though, one could see again why so many religious people felt a kinship with him. When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor, and leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” — that “death is no different whined at than withstood.”

Officially, Hitchens’s creed was one with Larkin’s. But everything else about his life suggests that he intuited that his fellow Englishman was completely wrong to give in to despair.

Arguing through adjectives, for one, and also (hard to not repeat myself) tremendously disrespectful, as though Hitchens' failure was an inability to follow his own arguments to their logical conclusion.

To be clear, as a Christian I am of the belief that Hitchens was generally wrong on matters of religion. But one of the salutary trends of Protestantism in the last fifteen years has been a move away from hectoring evangelism and towards the idea that conversion happens, if it ever does, through the slow and careful building of interpersonal relationships that for a long time have nothing to do with religion;* ie one has to care about the person involved as something more than a soul to be won or an intellectual argument to be had. This sort of thing really does visibly set us all back: allow him the dignity of his beliefs, sincerely held, even if mistaken, without implying them to be some kind of grand failure on his part.


*This works particularly well in concert with Reformed theology: God is doing all the action anyway, no need to scoot the process along. Instead focus one's energy on being a good friend and honest about all aspects of life, the part containing faith included, which I think is neither more nor less than what any friendship entails.