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COLUMNS
Christopher 'anti-theist' Hitchens: One grim reason we all need joy
Aug. 19, 2010 | The Catholic Sun
Christopher Hitchens, a 61-year-old author and journalist with a wildly proficient command of the English language (which he wields like a sword against opposing political and philosophical views, including and especially Christianity) is dying of esophageal cancer.
Author of many books including “God is Not Great,” he has been coined one of the “new atheists,” though he prefers “anti-theist,” or one who considers belief in God to be dangerous to the world.
So here he is, an angry, prolific secular humanist, at death’s door. It’s a predicament he probably wouldn’t concede as precarious.
If G.K. Chesterton were here, he might remind Hitchens, whose sole belief system is based on the authority of reason, that reason is itself a matter of faith. As Chesterton put forward in his book “Orthodoxy,” “It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”
So really, facing death, clinging to his reason, Hitchens is making an act of faith.
I don’t pretend to foresee the conversation Hitchens, or those like him, will have with St. Peter, metaphorically speaking. In my mind, I suppose, it looks a little bit like a Monty Python character I recall who went door to door “looking for an argument.”
I wonder, how it is that Hitchens has spent all that time with words, using reason and a remarkable gift of eloquence, and never embraced the Word? “In the beginning,” we read at the start of John’s Gospel, “was the Word.” Christ is the incarnation of Logos, which translates as thought or reason in word form. Hitchens, and other “anti-theists” so enamored by thought and reason somehow look right past its Source.
I think it has something to do with an aversion to happiness. Allow me to explain.
The oft-quoted “Wager” in Blaise Pascal’s “Pensées” maintains that whether reason can know that God exists is a moot point. If a man lives his life wagering that God exists, he has everything to gain and nothing to lose. Following a Christian axiom of love, he will be happy in this life, and “if he’s right,”he will be eternally joyful in heaven.
So it comes down to that palpable presence of the Holy Spirit in the believer, manifested as joy, that makes Christianity worth the wager. And I would wager that, even more than reason, this joy has been the greatest attraction for converts to the faith.
From all I have read and heard from Hitchens, happiness is not his bag. In fact, he often attempts to make a convincing argument for the necessity of hatred as one’s inspiration. In an interview, he once stated, “For a lot of people, their first love is what they’ll always remember. For me it’s always been the first hate, and I think that hatred, though it provides often rather junky energy, is a terrific way of getting you out of bed in the morning and keeping you going.” Given joy or “junky energy,” he chooses the latter. Hardly seems worth the wager, really.
Hitchens is dying from cancer, but it seems he suffers even more from an invasive and venomous commitment to hatred. And while well-presented “reasonable” arguments might seem attractive, when coupled with hatred, they just don’t have the staying power.
Still, God is good. In addition to his superb proficiency of the English language, Hitchens has been given another gift from God: the time to get a longer look at death’s door, and consider the very real other side, than most of us will. Hopefully a life lived on “junky energy” and the promise of the absence of joy thereafter will prove not worth the wager.
For our part, we have a two-fold responsibility. First, we must pray sincerely for Hitchens and those like him to be convicted by Truth so that they can know joy in this life and find Love in the next. And secondly, we must live out our faith with the real, attractive, palpable joy that comes from knowing Christ, so that our faith is attractive beyond a reasonable doubt. |
