"One little abstract sliver of the transcendent"

Cloisters, New York
[Photo By: KPA]

In my most recent post, Paris Would Show Me Her Beauty, I quote Theodore Dalrymple as well as post a full article by him, surprised that someone should understand how my 9-year-old self felt about the looping peripheral roads that surround Paris.

I was trying to illustrate my impressions (and feelings) as we arrived in Paris and traveled through the strands of autoroutes to get to our apartment in the center of Paris.

I had googled 'peripherique' and got to Dalrymple's article somehow. I used to read his on City Journal, but soon tired of his prison stories. I haven't read any of his articles for years now.

Well if I am to post a full article by him on my blog, I should really know more about him, and one way to do so would be to buy one of his (many) books.

And why not his most recent, which is a co-authorship with Kenneth Francis titled: The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd, and just came out on December 10, 2018?

There is not really much about the authors other than their literary achievements on these book-selling sites, so I went to good old reliable Wikipedia to find out more.

There is a lot there, but here's what caught my attention:

[Dalrymple] is an atheist, but has criticised anti-theism and says that "to regret religion [...] is to regret our civilisation and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy". Raised in a non-religious Jewish home, he began doubting the existence of a God at age nine. He became an atheist in response to a moment in a school assembly.

Here he writes (at City Journal once again) about that incident:

I first doubted God’s existence at about the age of nine. It was at the school assembly that I lost my faith. We had been given to understand that if we opened our eyes during prayers God would depart the assembly hall. I wanted to test this hypothesis. Surely, if I opened my eyes suddenly, I would glimpse the fleeing God? What I saw instead, it turned out, was the headmaster, Mr. Clinton, intoning the prayer with one eye closed and the other open, with which he beadily surveyed the children below for transgressions. I quickly concluded that Mr. Clinton did not believe what he said about the need to keep our eyes shut. And if he did not believe that, why should I believe in his God? In such illogical leaps do our beliefs often originate, to be disciplined later in life (if we receive enough education) by elaborate rationalization.

That moment in school assembly - AT AGE NINE! - is when he peeked from a closed-eye school prayer session and saw the Headmaster also peeking!

What intelligent nine-year-old doesn't clumsily confront God because of another clumsy transgression by an adult?

By age 30 this should be simply a "childish transgression" caused by irresponsible (and even perhaps non-believing) adults, and the belief, or non-belief, in God is based on more lofty matters.

But Dalrymple writes this article in 2007 at age fifty-nine! What fifty-nine-old, at the brink of his final meeting with God, makes his nine-year-old experience a pivotal moment in his life regarding his assessment on the presence (or absence) of God? What fifty-nine-old self-acclaimed philosopher does so? The intuition of little children, I suppose, reverse quoting Jesus' "Suffer the Little Children" to the level of blasphemy, and Dalrymple has blasphemed countless of times in his City Journal article.

But being an expert in philosophy, he knows that his non-belief cannot remove God, so wouldn't that make it a reason, the reason, to BELIEVE in God? What Dalrymple does is to leave a small crack for this momentous Being to somehow prove to him that He exists and thus to be worthy of belief. The arrogance of the atheist!

Since my posts are about beauty and art, I was interested in Dalrymple views on beauty and art. But he writes as though beauty appeared out of nowhere, as does his whole premise about life: it came out of nothing.

The arrogance of the atheist!

But it is more than arrogance now. We can ignore arrogance, or cram it into some ivory tower of an Ivy League. But many, ordinary, people read City Journal. And the language is not overly intellectual that many young people (smart school students, for example) can read it too. And there isn't time to go through texts of philosophical discourse, which the likes of Dalrymple spend decades deciphering, so what Dalrymple gives us is it.

Unless, that is, we start printing our own journals, far away from these postmodern centres of thought (and residence) to refute every single word that writers like Dalrymple conjure up, and make his sound like the seasoned wordwizard he is.

After I wrote (re-wrote) this post on Dalrymple, I googled his name further and found that Lawrence Auster of The View from the Right couldn't let pass Dalrymple's nihilistic (I would say Godless) view of our universe, and in one short phrase (amidst several comments by VFR readers related to atheists in general) he writes:

First the transcendent is denied, leaving only one little abstract sliver of the transcendent in place...[Note: the link is to a speech Larry made: The Political Religion of Modernity]

Which is what I say. A sliver of a comment adds to other slivers of comments, and then a whole anti-God thesis is drafted, by people we trust to be our allies.

Which is why we should we start printing our own journals, far away from these postmodern centres of thought (and residence).

And a website is a start.

God is watching.