Bertrand Russell's critique of Christianity has been one of this century's most conspicuous. It carried credibility because Russell was generally acknowledged to be a genius of the first rank, and because he attacked with such an intriguing mixture of passion and wit. Now that we have an excellent account of the first half of his life by Ray Monk (whose previous book was a widely acclaimed biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein), I want to raise what has always seemed to me an interesting question: Why did Bertrand Russell hate Christianity so much?
I will be speculating on the basis of Monk's account about the psychological causes of Russell's antipathy. This is risky for a mere philosopher, and I do not claim any psychological expertise. Monk doesn't either. But Russell is so articulate about his own mental states that a substantial account can be constructed without trying to go beyond what he says himself. A trained psychologist will undoubtedly see more, and see more clearly; but there is more than enough material in Russell's own words to license a layman's interest.
There is also something distasteful about an opponent mucking around in the history of somebody's personal life after his death. Should philosophers expect to have their views evaluated in the light of how they lived their lives? This is controversial. Kierkegaard, for example, condemned any attempt to separate the two, especially where the question is a philosopher's relation to God. Ethical and religious knowledge, he said, "has an essential relationship to the existence of the knower." In Russell's case there is an additional reason for overcoming the distaste. He seems to have relished inspection. He expected others to find his life fascinating and was not at all constrained by the usual sense of shame.
Monk's account is, as far as I can tell, factually accurate, and it has the great merit of being written by a philosopher. As Russell says when talking about the biographers of Socrates, he would himself rather have his biography written by an enemy who is a philosopher than by a friend who is not. It is possible to quibble with some of Monk's treatments of surrounding philosophers such as Bradley and McTaggart. Also troubling from the standpoint of objectivity is Monk's clear lack of sympathy for the piety of Russell's grandmother, who had charge of his upbringing after his parents' deaths. Monk quotes Russell's brother Frank at length to show the awfulness of the atmosphere at their grandmother's house. But the two brothers had very different relations with their grandmother, and Bertrand's feelings were always, I think, more ambivalent. By and large, however, the biography is convincing as a philosophical account as well as a personal history.
It is also well written and is, in fact, a page-turner. Monk does not spare us the gory details of Russell's betrayals and lies, his murderous rages and his devastating coldness, his arrogance and his self-pity. And yet, despite all of this, Monk clearly admires his subject and expresses both his admiration and his dislike with a dry and detached wit, which reminds one of Russell himself. Thus Monk records Russell's reaction to D. H. Lawrence's visit to Cambridge, "[He was] disgusted with Camb., but not with me." Monk adds, "[This] seemed to be just what Russell would expect from someone blessed with an infallible perceptiveness."
What keeps the reader fascinated is the unfolding of this double truth; that one of the century's brightest, most influential thinkers seems to have been at the same time capable of appalling cruelty and moral blindness.
One of Monk's major themes is that Russell was throughout his life terrified of the possibility that he might be, or might be going, mad. The cover picture of the book is a reworking of a drawing by Augustus John, which the book also contains. It is interesting to compare the cover with the drawing, because John's portrait of an eccentric has been turned into the portrait of a madman. There was indeed madness in the family, or at least so Russell was himself convinced. His grandmother used this argument in seeking to dissuade him from marrying Alys Pearsall Smith (the daughter of Hanna Whitall Smith, who wrote The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life). She found evidence of inherited instability in Alys's family as well and said it would be wrong for two people with such heredity to have children. When Russell decided to marry Alys anyway, he promised his grandmother that there would be no sleeping together. "Now that I know she is going to die soon," he wrote to Alys in justification, "I mind less giving her hopes not likely to be fulfilled."
Russell's sense of the hereditary danger was confirmed by his own experience. An informal account of what we would now call a psychopathic personality is the disorder of someone who is amoral, who harbors great rage that he usually hides, who considers almost all others inferior, and who is a pathological liar. Monk gives us evidence of all of these traits in these first 49 years of Russell's life. I am not trying to say here that Russell was a psychopath, but that he had evidence in his own life to make it reasonable for him to fear that he was predisposed to some such disorder.
There is first Russell's extraordinary lack of sensitivity to the feelings of others, except on rare and exalted occasions. Beatrice Webb, after a visit, put it this way, "[Russell] looks at the world from a pinnacle of detachment. What he lacks is sympathy and tolerance for other people's emotions." One of the most chilling examples of this trait is the story of Russell's relationship with Helen Dudley, whom he met in America and persuaded to come to England to live with him. When she arrived, he discovered he was no longer in love with her and got rid of her, as a result of which she suffered a complete and permanent mental breakdown. In his Autobiography, Russell puts it this way: "I had relations with her from time to time ... and I broke her heart."
It is not just what Russell did that is chilling, but the fact that he talks about this and other such episodes as though they had happened to somebody else. It is as though, in Kierkegaard's terms, he was merely the lookout on the mast, and not the captain of his own ship; indeed, his life bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Kierkegaard's aesthete in Either/Or. It is Kierkegaard's point that the aesthete has not managed the transition into the ethical life. In this, as in so much else, Russell knew himself. He was aware of his unusual capacity for "cold-blooded immorality."
Beatrice Webb continued, "He is a good hater." Russell's desire to kill people was sometimes quite literal. Indeed, this was one of his fears about his heredity, because of the fate of his Uncle Willy, who had lost his memory and ended up in a workhouse infirmary. As in Plato's example in the Republic, the police gave Uncle Willy back a knife he owned and with it he went on a murderous rampage. When institutionalized, he continued to be prone to apparently random attacks of rage and violence. Russell had moods in which he hated the whole human race. But he also had to fight against the desire to kill quite specific people, such as his friend Fitzgerald: "On one occasion, in an access of fury, I got my hands on his throat and started to strangle him. I intended to kill him, but when he began to grow livid, I relented. I do not think he knew that I intended murder."
Russell's sense of superiority and therefore isolation is what gives Monk his subtitle, "The Spirit of Solitude." "When I am talking to an ordinary person," Russell says, "I feel I am talking baby language, and it makes me lonely." In prison because of his antiwar activities, he reports that "Life here is just like life on an Ocean Liner. One is cooped up with a number of average human beings, unable to escape except into one's own state-room." Even when the announcement came that the war was over, Russell found that "the crowd was frivolous still, and had learned nothing during the period of horror, except to snatch at pleasure more recklessly than before. I felt strangely solitary amid the rejoicings, like a ghost dropped by accident from some other planet." The biography is one long story of Russell's attempts to break out of his sense of isolation, even from his family and friends. He never succeeds, except for brief and ecstatic moments.
One of the causes is that his friends always end up ceasing to trust him because he cannot resist constantly lying to them. He seems to have been a pathological liar. This started very early, with his grandmother. He maintained the outward show of piety, while departing further and further from the Christian faith. It became, however, a recognizable pattern in all his relationships, even those he cared most about. "You simply don't speak the truth," said D. H. Lawrence to him. "You simply are not sincere." Russell himself describes the crucial row with Wittgenstein this way: "Then he said he never knew whether I was speaking the truth or being polite, so I got vexed and refused to say another word."
Finally, there are some troubling suggestions that Russell increasingly got into the habit of lying to himself. One of the almost disarming features of Russell's character is that he was clearly aware of this tendency (as he was of all the others I have mentioned).
As one might expect, both the deception and the self-deception are painfully clear in Russell's descriptions of his endlessly complicated love affairs, but self-deception is also present in his philosophical work. There was in this an intellectual dishonesty that "spread like poison" and caused him to think (as he did repeatedly) of suicide. Thus he went on lecturing and writing as though he could ignore what (in some sense) he knew, that Wittgenstein's work in the Tractatus destroyed the connection Russell was trying to make between logic and psychology. From early on he was aware of his tendency to self-deception and therefore also aware of the danger of losing touch with his "inmost self," because the "crust" he was building up around it had become so thick.
I want to make three suggestions about why Russell hated Christianity so much. Suppose we grant, first, that Russell was afraid that he might be, or might be going, mad. How did he respond to this fear? With two incompatible strategies, both present in Kierkegaard's description of the aesthete.
The first was, in Russell's own words, to "retreat to the surface." This is a metaphor that relies on a strong dichotomy between reason and emotion. Russell means that he wanted to leave all of the murky passions down below and come up for air to the clear light of the sun. This is a strategy that he implemented by "intellect tempered by flippancy." I want to suggest as a hypothesis that he thought of rejecting God and rejecting his sense of his own sin as parts of this necessary retreat to the surface.
This strategy seems to alternate, however, with another one, which is to find a healthy outlet for his impulses in his sexual relations. Thus he comments about Dostoevsky's murderous protagonist in Crime and Punishment that "where the impulse is not trivial, it produces pronounced mania ... unless some strong and healthy passion is found to replace the one resisted." He also, I think, hated Christianity because it stood against the "healthy" expression of his desires, and thus required a dangerous repression. The Christian God is the enemy, whichever of the two strategies is adopted. God is either hounding him in his internal life or trying to block him by "senseless prohibitions" from the only kind of external release that would do any good.
Second, there is strong evidence earlier in Russell's life of his making a dichotomy between reason and passion, and his locating the appeal of Christianity with the latter. There is an initial premise here about what reason requires, which (given the dichotomy) ensures that Christianity will be classed with passion. For Christianity to be credible, Russell thinks, it has to be proved. He sounds very like W. K. Clifford, whose book influenced him deeply just at the point he was rejecting Christianity as an adolescent. He reflects Clifford not only in his views but in the "robustious pathos" (as William James puts it) with which Clifford expressed them.
Clifford's principle was that Christian belief, just like any belief, needs evidence; and in the case of Christianity there was just not enough evidence for a responsible thinker to accept it. Russell imagines saying to God when he arrives at the pearly gates, "Not enough evidence." As an adolescent, he vowed to accept "only scientific arguments" for belief in God and "to reject all sentiment." But if belief in the Christian God is what some philosophers now call "properly basic," it is a mistake to think that it has to be proved at all.
This review is not the place to pursue that argument. The point here is that once Russell had convinced himself that the evidence was deficient, and that all the standard arguments for the existence of God failed, he was then free to conclude that it is only emotion that holds Christians in thrall. "I do not think," he says in Why I Am Not a Christian, "that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds."
Third, there were gods still in principle available for his intellect, namely, the god of the Platonists or, alternatively, the god of Spinoza. But because of the empiricist turn of his thought, Russell gradually ceased to believe in these gods as well. There was, first, what he calls "a retreat from Pythagoras." This was painful for Russell because he could not bear to think of rationality in other than transcendent terms, as an access to a kind of being beyond the realm of nature. But he came to think that this kind of Platonism could not be justified. And in his Autobiography he records how he lost belief even in the somewhat abstract god that Spinoza allowed himself. "I have loved a ghost," he says, "and in loving a ghost my inmost self has itself become spectral."
Russell still felt, throughout the period covered by Monk, an acute sense of the absence of God and a longing for his presence. "The longing for religion is at times almost unbearably strong," he writes to Lady Ottoline Morrell. It may be that he tended toward religiosity in his writing to her just because he perceived she liked it. But the sentiment can be found repeated in several contexts. This sense of loss is what makes me think his early response to his grandmother's piety is more complex than Monk allows. Every now and again, this longing for God breaks through, sometimes as a sense of the gap between what God wants him to be and what he is, and sometimes as a sense of the possibility that he might become better.
An example of the first kind of experience is the intense prayer for forgiveness he records in his diary as an undergraduate, after he has supposedly lost his faith, "O God forgive me; I have sinned grievously." Later, the sense of sin keeps recurring, as a kind of self-hatred. "The disgust of human life that I have been feeling lately is generally a sign of unrecognized sin." An example of the second kind of experience is what he calls his "conversion." It came after reading Gilbert Murray's translation of the Hippolytus, when Russell was with Evelyn Whitehead (Alfred North Whitehead's wife) during one of her bouts of pain. In his Autobiography he writes,
Within five minutes I went through some such reflections as the
following: the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable; nothing can
penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that
religious teachers have preached.... For a time, a sort of mystic
illumination possessed me. Having for years cared only for exactness and
analysis, I found myself filled with semi-mystical feelings about beauty.
On another occasion Russell found himself on his knees in a church in Verona, praying for strength to subdue his instincts. He does not associate either experience explicitly with God, but what strikes this reader is the echoes of Russell's grandmother's piety, which was also a religion of love, duty, and suffering.
A Christian can see these experiences as God trying to break through, as the untiring chase by the hound of heaven. But Russell himself could not interpret them that way, or at least he could not do so for long. My hypothesis about why he could not do so is the one I gave earlier. The experience of God's presence and his own failure was just too painful for him, and the pain was too close to his fear of madness.
One response was the retreat to the surface and to disengagement. But like Kierkegaard's aesthete he was, paradoxically, aware of himself. He was aware that he was not only losing a substantial God but also himself turning into a ghost. Another response was to re-engage in his sexual liaisons, which in turn generated a vicious cycle of self-disgust.
It may be that this hypothesis is hopelessly amateur. But we need some explanation for Russell's hatred of Christianity. It is not merely that he thinks Christianity mistaken; he writes about it with a passion that springs from some deep personal source. This leads him to some surprising errors of judgment and overstatement, such as his claim that Christianity has been the enemy of modern science from its beginning, or his claim that religious persecution starts and ends with Judaism and Christianity.
But I am not going to try to treat these claims further here. I am looking forward to Monk's second volume, which will cover the period from 1921 to Russell's death in 1970. It will be interesting to see how the hypothesis fares about his life as the progress of a Kierkegaardian aesthete toward the various forms of despair and its denial. Will we, for example, find Russell increasingly seeking distraction in various public contexts from his internal and private failures, and increasingly distanced from any core philosophical commitments of his own? In the first volume we have, in any case, a fascinating study of Russell's rejection of God, fascinating because he and his biographer have given us such an acute and unvarnished description of this extraordinary life's trajectory.
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Book reviewed --
Bertrand Russell:
The Spirit of Solitude, 1872-1921
By Ray Monk
Free Press
695 pp.; $35
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John Hare is professor of philosophy at Calvin College and author most recently of The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God's Assistance (Oxford University Press).
Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books and Culture Magazine. May/June, Vol. 3, No. 3, Page 26
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