Religion: The God-Haters

What have atheists in common with saints? A great deal, suggests top-rank Roman Catholic Philosopher Jacques Maritain, now teaching at Princeton, in the current issue of the quarterly Review of Politics. "The genuine, absolute atheist, with all his sincerity and devotion," he concludes, "is but an abortive saint and, at the same time, a mistaken revolutionist."

Writing "On the Meaning of Contemporary Atheism," Maritain sharply differentiates between the various manifestations of Godlessness. There are the "practical atheists, who believe that they believe in God but who in reality deny His existence by each one of their deeds—they worship the world, and power, and money. Then there are the pseudo-atheists, who believe that they do not believe in God but who in reality unconsciously believe in Him, because the god whose existence they deny is not God but something else. Finally, there are absolute atheists, who actually deny the existence of the very God in whom the believers believe—God the Creator, Savior and Father . . . who stand committed to change their entire system of values and to destroy in themselves everything that suggests God's name."

Faith in Reverse. The absolute atheists, says Maritain, are represented today chiefly by the academic high fashion of existentialism and the militant mission of Communism. For them, he says, the casting aside of God is "a basic act of moral choice." It is, in other words, an act of faith in reverse which, in pretending to deny religion, "is a full-blown religious commitment." But it is a tragic failure. Example: the Communist, whose atheism begins as a declaration of independence, plunges into a new slavery "to a worldly demiurge crazy for human minds to bend and bow and yield . . . the blind god of history."

Absolute atheism, writes Maritain, "deprives God and mankind of some potential saints, in making their attempts at heroic freedom a failure, and turning their effort to break with the world into a total and servile subservience to the world." Conversely, saints have been the greatest revolutionaries. Maritain contends that for centuries the world's temporal progress was fostered by the saints. It was only during the last hundred-odd years, when the results of the industrial revolution were bringing mankind more & more to social thinking and social action, that the saints dropped from the lead and the atheists took over.

The Decorative Faith. In this defection of leadership, Maritain sees "a kind of punishment of the Christian world, which for a long period had more or less betrayed Christianity in its practical endeavor, and despised the lessons of the saints, and forsaken the immense herd of the hopeless whom destitution and unlivable conditions of existence riveted to hell on earth."