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Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer Christopher Beha (Penguin Press)
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‘When I was fifteen years old, an angel of God came to me at night, pinned me to my bed, and demanded that I put my trust in the Lord.’ The first sentence of Why I Am Not an Atheist by Christopher Beha, former editor of the august Harper’s magazine, is stunning. Beha claims that these nocturnal ‘visitations continued for years, varying in power and vividness, though each was terrifying and unmistakably real’.
Although Beha is ambiguous about the nature of these visitations by the end of the book, they are a compelling narrative gambit. One paradox of Catholicism is that we often think it is primarily an ancient faith when it comes to the miraculous. While an incarnational view of the world suffuses the quotidian with the sacred, the nakedly supernatural feels out of place in the modern world.
Miracles do not have an end date. To be Catholic, truly, is to believe that one might happen this afternoon.
Beha’s book comes with a subtitle: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer. The critic Bernard Bergonzi has noted that while David Lodge described himself as an ‘agnostic Catholic’, Graham Greene used the term ‘Catholic agnostic’. Both formulations might apply to Beha. He grew up Catholic in Manhattan, in a family that ‘shared a love of lowbrow gross-out comedy’ films. None of them saw an affinity for low art ‘as being in tension with religious devotion’.
He started skipping Mass as a Princeton undergraduate. ‘It wasn’t so much that I didn’t believe in God,’ he notes, ‘but that I didn’t believe that the God of all this suffering was worthy of my weekly devotion.’ Why I Am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell was a formative book; he appreciated Russell’s ‘insistence that we must respond to our fear not by dogmatically accepting the creeds handed down to us by tradition and authority but by “look[ing] the world frankly in the face” with a “fearless outlook and a free intellect.”’
You might think that you have heard this story before. But Beha’s book is unique. Rather than a memoir of a young writer’s unbelief, it is an exceedingly readable and deft history of Western thought. I only wish that I had Beha’s book during my years of undergraduate philosophical study. He qualifies ‘that I am neither a trained philosopher nor an intellectual historian, that I am simply trying to convey what these books meant to me in my search, rather than offering a definitive reading of them’, yet no apologies are necessary. He is a deft thinker who will send readers towards his primary sources, thankful for his guidance.
Beha long surmised that ‘the great modern thinkers [were] very different from the pictures of them given in popular accounts’. The lineage of agnosticism is populated with deep thinkers who have wrestled with faith – and often lamented their unbelief.
Honest doubt does not bother Beha. But much contemporary unbelief is flippant and foolish. ‘One of the defining features of the New Atheists,’ he writes, ‘the thing that made them so appealing to some and so smugly unappealing to others – was their self-satisfied Epicureanism.’ Whether anchored in scientific materialism or romantic idealism, an atheistic worldview often posits ‘that life’s everyday pleasures – food and drink and sex, conviviality and companionship – are the only real human goods’.
All of those pleasures, certainly, have a strong place in Catholic tradition. Yet absent a sense of transcendence, they are ephemeral, and at worst empty. The more Beha read, thought and lived as an agnostic, he realised that the ‘promise’ and ‘disappointments’ of unbelief ultimately ‘made belief possible for me again’.
Like the project of St Thomas Aquinas, ‘who dedicated his life to reconciling Aristotle with Christian doctrine’, Beha feels that ‘faith and reason and revelation [are] ultimately consistent with each other’. His synthesis is ambitious, and Beha covers much intellectual ground: Montaigne, Hume, Spinoza, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, Mill, Darwin, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Rousseau, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and more. There is breadth and depth here. The book is endlessly quotable. (‘“The Christian religion,” Wittgenstein wrote, “is only for the man who needs infinite help.” Over many years I have come to discover that I am that man.”’)
Beha ultimately longs for community. ‘Constructing your own worldview is incredibly isolating.’ In a solipsistic vision of the world, others ‘exist as paper cutouts, characters in our world-making drama rather than fellow inhabitants of a shared world, and we exist for them in just the same way’.
A Catholic worldview offers such nuance. Catholicism recognises ‘both our human freedom and our human limitations’. Beha found in that belief ‘a balance between the material reality of the physical world and the spiritual reality of the individual person’, as well as the intellectual honesty ‘that I wasn’t going to figure everything out, that certain things would remain always mysterious’. The purpose of our existence is clear: ‘to know and love the created order and through doing so to know and love God’.
Beha’s subtitle reveals his dénouement: he has returned to the Church. Yet his journey was long and arduous, and Why I Am Not an Atheist is an enlightening travelogue of the mind and the soul.
