The Life of Bertrand Russell: Apologia for Modern Paganism

Bertrand Russell stands at the end of a philosophic line of succession extending from John Locke through David Hume and John Stuart Mill. As such, he is heir to perhaps the most civilized and intelligent tradition in the modern Western world. Like the giants before him, he is distinguished for his analytical brilliance, lucid literary style, sane empiricism, humanistic ethics, courageously enlightened life, and like them, except for Locke, he is a religious agnostic. He is indeed a magnificent fusion of passion and skepticism.

Alan Wood's biography is not a definitive one. It hardly could be since the tireless octogenarian it has for its subject has already survived his biographer (who died last year) and has, since the book reached the stands, created the need for another chapter by leading the nuclear disarmament movement which is now rocking England. Even so, the author often takes too doting an attitude. Most intelligent children are somewhat saddened, for example, when they find that Euclid's axioms cannot themselves be proven; but in the disappointment of the eleven-year old Russell, Wood imagines he sees already adumbrated three volumes of the Principia Mathematica. Nor are his repeated references to Russell as "the greatest logician since Aristotle" as indubitable as they sound; Frege would be a more likely contender for this distinction, and Goedel perhaps an equal one.

But The Passionate Skeptic is a highly readable and enjoyable book, simply because it relates the life of an extraordinary contemporary who has constantly been in the thick of things, intellectual and political, for the past 87 years. There are personal glimpses of such luminaries as G. E. Moore, Wittgenstein, Shaw, Keynes, Santayana, Whitehead, H. G. Wells, the Trevelyans, the Webbs, and the sessions of the Bloomsbury Group. There are also the various views of Harvard as it has changed over the half-century during which Russell has visited it. When Russell taught symbolic logic here in 1914, for instance he seemed to find his students a cloddish lot. (There were, as Russell wrote at the time, two exceptions however: one was a young Greek named Raphael Demos, the other a fellow called T.S. Eliot.)

But it is the adventures of the man himself which, above all, make this story an entertaining, moving, and important one. While never surrendering the rigorous standards of a great analytic philosopher, Russell has been deeply and outspokenly "involved," "committed," "existentially concerned" with the dilemmas that have beset his age. He has realized that it is precisely because the areas philosophers so often forfeit to politicians and theologians are murky, irrational, and vague, that thinkers professionally concerned with clarity and logic should not hesitate to comment on them--and even, if need be, to come out of the study and crusade.

One of the most extraordinary scenes the twentieth century can afford for future generations will be the sight of Bertrand Russell in his cell in Brixton Prison, serenely composing his technical Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy while serving the sentence imposed by the British government for the crime of being an active pacifist during World War I.

Why I Am Not A Christian will not contain much that is new for those who have passed through the illuminating fires of Hum 5 or Phil 1b. But the apalling atavistic rites that drew earnest millions to Madison Square Garden last summer, and the pietistic claptrap emanating constantly from the White House indicate that Russell's rationalistic pamphleteering is still far from superfluous. Neither the great mass of people nor their highest leaders have evidently yet caught up with the thought of the eighteenth century. Russell performs a real service by reiterating the unrefuted arguments of Voltaire and Hume which, seemingly out of sheer ignorance, popular Christianity has chosen to ignore.

Poisoned Altruism

He also repeats, in milder form, Nietzsche's moral and psychological critique and traces as deftly as the vehement Antichrist himself the subtle ways in which humility and self-effacement can be poisoned with unconscious resentment and servility, pious altruism functioning as the cloak for ferocious resentment and hate. (Members of the Harvard religious community who think that this element has altogether vanished from sophisticated contemporary Christianity were obviously not listening to the responsive reading they recited during a recent service in Memorial Church: "...Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head."--Selection Eight-Four of the Hymnbook.)

But whatever its virtues as a piece of popular literature, Why I Am Not A Christian will probably fail in academic circles because it takes no note of the two main nineteenth-century developments in theology, which theologians have done little but elaborate ever since.

On the one hand, Soren Kierkegaard has led a return to the primitive essentials of Christianity by his re-definition of true faith as deep belief which not only is unjustified by the available evidence, but is irrelevant to all possible evidence or even runs headlong against it--belief which, is, in short, "absurd." The claim to have gotten "beyond" rational thought is a form of what Russell regards as the arch-vice, intellectual dishonesty. He would probably say that it is patently impossible to argue with someone who insists on Tertullian's Credo quia absurdum est. Such a case needs a psychiatrist, not syllogisms.

Hegel and Tillich

The other development found some of its earliest modern representatives in the German romantic philosophers, who sought to preserve the validity of various dogmas by taking them symbolically--seeing them as poetic anticipations of their own profound ontological discoveries. Thus Hegel explained the Trinity as a figurative approximation to his everlasting metaphysical waltz-step of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, and Professor Tillich finds the doctrine of the Incarnation still viable because it expresses "the principle of the divine self-manifestation in the ground of being itself ... the dynamic spiritual word which mediates between the silent mystery of the abyss of being and the fulness of concrete, individualized, self-related beings."

But here again one supects that Russell would first of all smile and remark that this is a grossly unhistorical idea of what millions of Christians have meant for centuries whenever they said "and He was made man;" and secondly that his opponents speak they-know-not-what.

For whether you agree with Russell or not, it is a constant joy to be sure you know what he means by what he is saying. Even in reading Russell's most complex and difficult treatises, one never suspects him of trying to avoid an issue by throwing up a meaningless verbal smokescreen that will hide the obvious banality or falsehood of his views on certain points. This is the result of that slow, painful climb toward greater intellectual clarity which has been the life-work of Russell and his colleagues, Moore and Wittgenstein, and which some contemporary writing is doing so much to negate. Thus in the first volume of his Systematic Theology, Professor Tillich cites Hegel fourteen times, and Russell not once. If England's greatest living philosopher were aware of it at all, one suspects that he would regard this fact as a greater tribute than the Nobel Prize