Europe Needs a Faith

Arthur Koestler has composed a morality play for our times. It is not a great drama, for no sense of tragedy can permeate the cardboard world of animated abstractions that the book contains. But as a moral tale for the despairing civilization of the West, it conveys well the plight of a people lost without faith.

Koestler has discerned a striking parallel between the rise of the Christian Church on the crumbling base of pagan Rome and the advance of contemporary Communism against a civilization which has lost faith in its God and is slowly disintegrating into the resultant void. He is not comparing the moral worth of Christianity with that of Communism; rather he demonstrates regretfully that strong faith of any kind can give impetus to social movements.

Fedya Nikitin personifies this new twentieth-century faith that is encroaching upon the bankrupt culture of the West. As cultural attache of the Paris office of the "Free Commonwealth" (a new name given the U.S.S.R. in the 1950's), Fedya has unquestioning faith in the ideals of the Party. Koestler maims the impact that such a character might have, however, for Fedya appears as more of an anthropomorphized concept than a real man with a fixed idea.

A note of profound pessimism pervades the work. Everyone is disillusioned by the beliefs he once cherished, each possesses an inarticulate longing for some Absolute to which he can cling. Only Communists like Fedya have replaced this longing with faith, but Fedya follows his blindly. His is but a conditioned reflex.

Koestler shows clearly, albeit, not most effectively, how European intellectuals feel themselves trapped in a void between the freedom-stifling regime of the Communists and the naive bewilderment of the Americans. He does nothing to resolve the dilemma. Some say he personally is turning to mysticism. For the rest of the Europeans, perhaps an intelligent and serious restatement of the American credo would be of help.