Laughter without Joy: The Burlesque of Our Secular Age

Sometime in the early 1880’s, a plain-faced, middle-aged woman sat in her father’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts, musing on the dying. She knew well, from close observation at many deathbeds, the difference between those who died in confidence of an eternity with God and those who entered fearfully upon the unknown. Reflecting upon the experience of her father and mother, other members of her family, and at least two men with whom she had been in love, Emily Dickinson wrote a poem:

Those-dying then,

Knew where they went-

They went to God’s Right Hand-

That Hand is amputated now

And God cannot be found-

The abdication of Belief

Makes the Behavior small

Better an ignis fatuus

Than no illume at all-

T. S. Eliot divided modern literature into three periods in its attitude toward Christianity. The first period, he said, “took the Faith … for granted, and omitted it from its picture of life.” This era may be said to have lasted until the middle of the nineteenth century; perhaps, to pin it down, until the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. “In the second,” Eliot goes on, the age “doubted, worried about, or contested the Faith.” Here he was thinking of such writers as Matthew Arnold, Herman Melville, Thomas Hardy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Emily Dickinson.

The third period is the one in which we are living: “It is the phase of those who have never heard the Christian Faith spoken of as anything but an anachronism.” Eliot notes that as a result “the whole of modern literature is corrupted by what I call Secularism.” To Eliot, secularism is “simply unaware of, simply cannot understand the meaning of, the primacy of the supernatural over the natural life.”

In Dickinson’s poem, “those dying then” represent the age of complacent faith. The amputation of “God’s Right Hand” is a fitting metaphor by which to describe subsequent assaults upon belief in God in an age of skepticism and doubt. And then we come to the age of secularism and “the abdication of Belief.” Here we pass into a rejection of transcendence exceeding even the dismembering of God. Secularism is marked by its stubborn refusal to grant even the most grudging acknowledgment that any dimension exists outside the boundaries of this natural world. Any talk of God—metaphorical or metaphysical—is an insult to the Secular Mind. To the secularist, as Karl Heim has written, God has become “an impossible thought, not framable by the mind.”

In other words, secularism is far more than the absence of belief, which may be mere unbelief or skepticism. And secularism is also more than the opposite of belief, which is disbelief. For while disbelief is an active adversary, inimical to faith, disbelief suffers this logical handicap: to disbelieve one must grant the possibility of a reasonable alternative, to believe. But “the abdication of belief’ means that the Secular Mind no longer contests the phantoms and fantasies of faith. The secularist’s only prayer is the litany in Hemingway’s story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”: “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name.… Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”

Yet, very few writers are capable of sustaining so dire a philosophy of nothingness. To many, a more reasonable course left for mankind is laughter, an inane guffaw at the outrageous condition of human existence. With La Bruyère they would say, “We must laugh before we are happy for fear of dying without laughing at all.” One such novelist is Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., of whom the critic Alfred Kazin has said, “Vonnegut’s horselaugh of self-deprecation finally becomes his picture of the damned human race.” In his novels, from the early and prophetic Player Piano, with its vision of a cybernetic dystopia, to Slapstick, Vonnegut systematically belittles human beings by clinically exposing our least desirable traits. As we read a novel like Slaughterhouse-Five, we too laugh and wonder why.

Certain aspects of our civilization provide an environment in which self-mockery may flourish. We are living at a time when, to quote from Joan Didion’s remarkable collection of American vignettes, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, the clearest evidence of the presence of evil is “the absence of seriousness.” We have endured pop art and the soup can, op art and its illusions, “happenings,” camp, hula hoops, piano smashing, conceptual art, Chubby Checker and the Twist at the Peppermint Lounge, and streaking, to mention what would be only the start of a ludicrous list.

In this burlesque of modern living, death is disguised with euphemisms and mortal terror dismissed with a joke. But all this is juvenile in the face of legitimate fears that, at any moment, mankind may choose to destroy itself. Facing the possibility of finality, the writers who most clearly cast the shape of this secular age belong to that generation whose common heritage is the Jewish Holocaust: Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Arthur Miller, Karl Shapiro, and others.

None of us who lived through the plague of National Socialism as Christians, Gentiles, Aryans, non-Jews, or whatever other catchword of Nordic supremacy you choose, can begin to grasp the meaning of the Nazi outrage upon humanity in general, European Jews in particular. Identity cards, the sacrilege of a swastika on a synagogue wall, the yellow star, a ban on certain artists and their work, the knock in the night, the vanishing of whole families without a trace, the cattle cars, the work camps, a tatooed number, more travel by sardine cans on rails; at last, the death camp and its invitation to a fatal shower. This madness, I remind you, was “the final solution to the Jewish question.” To us—especially to some who were not born yet—the names of Dachau, Belsen, Auschwitz, and the rest of those charnel houses seem foreign, the events distant in time. But to every Jew, the names are as familiar as his own, the events as real as if they were happening now.

Some Christians find it relatively easy to rid their minds of the Jewish slaughter by blaming it on Hitler’s demonic hatred. But this is a gross oversimplification. It ignores the shameful collaboration in genocide by representatives of the church in Germany who, by their silence if nothing else, acquiesced to the extermination plot. There were exceptions, of course, and their names are saintly: Martin Niemoller, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Father Maximilian Kolbe, and the ambiguous Kurt Gerstein. (If you are not familiar with Gerstein’s story, I urge you to read A Spy for God by Pierre Joffroy, the most transfixing account to come out of World War II.) But apart from these and some others who are less well known, like Corrie ten Boom, the record of professing Christians is marred. Surviving Jews know very well that neither the German state church nor the Roman Catholic hierarchy took a stand on behalf of the Jews against their murderers. If you are at all uncertain about what Friedrich Heer calls “the living lie of German Christendom,” then you must read Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy and its documentation.

Except in degree, however, the “final solution” was not so different from persecution and pogroms throughout history. Ever since Sethos and Raamses of Egypt, there had been tyrants who oppressed, villains like Haman and Alfred Rosenberg who schemed, and mobs of unreasoning men to carry out their foul business. But before there had also been a Moses, an Esther, to deliver. Where was Esther in 1933? More important, where was Israel’s God?

The question of God is the key to Jewish identity. Without God, the Jew is a cynosure among the nations, a foundling, the only kid on the block without a Father, without a name. Judaism has nothing to offer if God did not call Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldees and set him in the Land of Canaan. Every Jew must believe this, or else he repudiates his patrimony, sells his birthright, and becomes the son of Esau.

Yet what is there left to believe? At best, God is a Jewish uncle who forgot to show up for the Bar-Mitzvah; at worst, a faithless lover who fled for his own safety when the bullies and rapists approached. After generations of apostasy, any traditional belief in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob expired forever in the gas ovens of Europe.

The failure of God to deliver six million of his Chosen People out of the hands of Hitler, Rosenberg, Goebbels, Eichmann, and the rest disqualified him and his claims to a covenant relationship with the Jews. Thereafter, all that remained of a historic union between God and the Jews was memory.

This is the rupture the Jewish writer now feels between his father’s faith and his own secularism. The question is this: “If God is dead, then why am I a Jew?” A poem by Karl Shapiro called simply “Jew” manifests the quandary.

The name is immortal but only the name, for the rest

Is a nose that can change in the weathers of time or persist

Or die out in confusion or model itself on the best.

But the name is a language itself that is whispered and hissed

Through the houses of ages, and ever a language the same

And ever and ever a blow on our heart like a fist.

And this last of our dream in the desert, O curse of our name,

Is immortal as Abraham’s voice in our fragment of prayer

Adonai, Adonai, for our bondage of murder and shame!

And the word for the murder of God will cry out on the air

Though the race is no more and the temples are closed of our will

And the peace is made fast on the earth and the earth is made fair;

Our name is impaled in the heart of the world on a hill

Where we suffer to die by the hands of ourselves, and to kill (Published in Today’s Poet, ed. by

Chad Walsh, Scribner’s, 1964, pp. 153 and 154).

To the secular Jew, cut off from the Torah and Holy Days, history is no longer a link with God but a reminder of the oath taken in rashness and rage, “His blood be upon us and upon our children.” The Jew as Christ-killer—this is his curse, like the mark of Cain. History becomes hell to be lived through again and again—in the shtetls of the Russian Pale, in the Warsaw ghetto, on the Golan Heights, at Munich’s Olympic Village, at Entebbe airport. As Yakov Bok, in Bernard Malamud’s novel The Fixer, comes to realize, “being born a Jew meant being vulnerable to history, including its worst errors.” But Malamud has also said, “All men are Jews,” meaning perhaps that no man knows the significance of his own existence apart from the existence of God.

“Tragedy arises when you are in the presence of a man who has missed accomplishing his joy,” wrote Arthur Miller in an essay concerning Death of a Salesman. “But the joy must be there, the promise of the right way of life must be there. Otherwise pathos reigns, and an endless, meaningless, and essentially untrue picture of man is created—man helpless under the falling piano, man wholly lost in a universe which by its very nature is too hostile to be mastered.”

In the end, therefore, the purpose of all art is religious; it is either a statement about or a search for the “right way of life.” There is no way to write, to sing, to paint, to dance, to love or be loved without calling into account the God in whom we believe or disbelieve. Secularism’s greatest hoax is its claim to have made God obsolete to human consciousness. That simply can never be.

Furthermore, we must allow for the possibility that some persons may possess unconsciously what they consciously reject; as John Baillie puts it in Our Knowledge of God, even those who “deny God with the top of their minds” may believe at the same time “from the bottom of their hearts.” And Leslie A. Fiedler has noted that “the belief of many atheists is closer to a true love of God and a true sense of his nature, than the kind of easy faith which, never having experienced God, hangs a label bearing his name on some childish fantasy.”

One of the most affecting books I have ever read is A Walker in the City, the personal narrative of Alfred Kazin. He tells us what it means to be a Jew in this secular age. Recalling his boyhood in Brooklyn, Kazin speaks of his early struggle to believe: “I was a Jew. Yet it puzzled me that no one around me seemed to take God very seriously. We neither believed nor disbelieved. He was our oldest habit.… Yet I never really wanted to give Him up. In some way it would have been hopeless to justify to myself—I had feared Him so long—He fascinated me, He seemed to hold the solitary place I most often went back to” (Harcourt, 1951, pp. 46 and 47).

One day, on the steps of the New York Public Library, Kazin accepted a copy of the New Testament and began reading eagerly: “… and the poor have the gospel preached to them. And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me. Offended in him? I had known him instantly. Surely I had been waiting for him all my life—our own Yeshua, misunderstood by his own, like me, but the very embodiment of everything I had waited so long to hear from a Jew.… It was he I thought, who would resolve for me at last the ambiguity and the long ache of being a Jew—Yeshua, our own long-lost Jesus, speaking straight to the mind and heart at once.… He was Yeshua, my own Reb Yeshua, of whose terrible death I could never read without bursting into tears—Yeshua, our own Yeshua …” (pp. 161 and 162).

A few years ago Kazin turned to me at a dinner table and said, “Tell me what you Christians mean when you say that Jesus is Lord.” I admit that I was tongue-tied, inarticulate, disappointing as I tried to express my faith. I am reminded now of the urging of another writer: Albert Camus said, “What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear … in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest man.”

This is our challenge in a world shriveled and atrophied by its “abdication of Belief.” It is a challenge we dare not ignore. Even if victimized by stammering tongues and the limits of our own illumination, we possess two certain gifts: not the rhetoric of men but the Word of Truth; not an ignis fatuus but the Light of the World. And, in the words of my favorite example in the Gospels, the father in Mark 9, we can cry out in assurance, “Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief.”

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

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