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The Communist authorities never knew just what to do with Vaclav Havel. And it has come to pass that Western intellectuals don't know just what to do with him, either. That's because, as the poetry of action transmuted into the prose of reflection, his inner life turned out to be as unlikely as his outer life. This hero of sorts is also a fellow intellectual. Very good. An intellectual who became a practicing politician. Even better. Just the sort of person whose utterances should regularly appear in the pages of the New York Review of Books. He became the president of a whole country. Best of all. So much reflected glory for intellectuals to bask in.

And so refreshing in his politics. "Antipolitical politics," Havel calls his position, and we understand. He rebels against the all-too-familiar line-your-pockets, business-as-usual politics that we'd rebel against, too, were we ever to have his prominence. See his integrity in adapting for the nineties the countercultural vision he and we—some of us—came to in the sixties. No wonder thousands of America's young flock to Prague to find authenticity in public life and pubs. And such style. Still wearing jeans and sweaters when he can. Cool and charming, well-read and well-spoken. He is his own man.

And yet. Aren't some of his comments just a tad strange? This cosmopolitan can sound almost as bothered by "godless communism" as the squares and rednecks of the fifties. The communism part we can understand, since, as it was actually practiced, proved to be a failed experiment, however noble in theory, and also it sent him to prison. But the "godless" part? Why that accusatory fixation with atheism? Despite his rearing in Roman Catholicism, he's not a churchgoer, thank God, not churchy at all. But he can seldom get through a speech without bringing in The Transcendent—yes, his usage brings capital letters to mind. Well, let Havel be Havel, and pull the veil over the quirks that any self-actualizing figure is bound to have. He's our man, after all.

Politicizing intellectuals will do what they must. One thing they won't do is justice to Havel. He says he never took "a systematic interest in politics" nor "identified with a particular political or economic doctrine, theory, or ideology." He minimizes his most warmly received term, "antipolitical politics," as an occasional term for a given context, to which he "never felt compelled to return." For instance, in his celebrated "Dear Dr. Husak" letter, his peculiar kind of dissent blames the leader not for the abandonment of elections or the centralization of the economy but for "the gradual erosion of all moral standards, the breakdown of all criteria of decency, and the widespread destruction of confidence in the meaning of values such as truth, adherence to principles, sincerity, altruism, dignity and honor." He faults the government not because it is communist but "because it is bad." This is a fundamentally moral vision, and looking at it through the prism of politics distorts it. No wonder Havel once remarked, "I seldom encounter genuine understanding."

To say that Havel is a moral, not a political, thinker is to start to get him right. But from what wellspring does he draw his moral vision? Here the news could not be worse for his secular admirers, for exactly what makes them uneasy lies deepest in his world-view. Havel talks a lot about God, and he means for us to take that talk seriously. His essays reveal a distinctly spiritual cast of mind; they locate the source of morality in the spiritual experience of mankind. Moreover, Havel finds religious formulations particularly congenial. Though conversant in the going ideas circulating around him, he thinks against their grain. For wisdom he reverts, unfashionably, to traditional categories of Western thought, and the older he gets, the further back he looks. Although this is not to say that religious believers will at all points be delighted with his outlook, he is unsparingly critical of atheism and routinely sympathetic toward religionists. This is the Havel we scarcely know. It is also the Havel that matters most. As in the outer drama of his sensational life, so in the inner drama of his life of the mind, Havel is indeed his own man.

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