WHY I AM NOT AN ATHEIST: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer, by Christopher Beha
Christopher Beha’s long and winding road from well-read atheist to even better-read Christian begins with a compelling image: An angel appears to him. Not Jimmy Stewart’s befuddled buddy Clarence from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” but a demanding and persistent apparition.
As he explains in his deep-dive meditation on faith and philosophy, “Why I Am Not an Atheist,” the spirit told him to put his trust in God. “This was no dream,” he writes of the initial visitation in the mid-1990s, when he was 15. “I was awake — I am as certain of that as I’m certain that I’m awake while I write these words — and a terrifying presence was communicating to me.”
The visits continued for years. Beha was raised Catholic, on New York’s Upper East Side, by a very bookish family that sent him to Princeton. He is a former editor of Harper’s Magazine and the author of four previous books, whose range of subjects — from clever novels on emotional complications to a survey of the classics — shows his ambidextrous literary talents.
A few years after the imperious cherub told him to get right by the Lord, Beha realized the whole thing could be explained by science. He’d experienced sleep paralysis, awake but unable to move, complete with hallucinations.
“I had suffered a reasonably common physical affliction and, rather than trying to find a rational cause for it, I had retreated into superstition,” he writes. “I’d actually convinced myself that God was sending me a message.”
As someone who also saw something inexplicable (a long-dead saint opening her eyes from a crypt in Italy), I preferred the teenage Beha who was filled with religious wonder. Not to worry. By the end of the book, he returns to the angel with an expanded view. It was both miracle and real. “I know what ‘caused’ these visitations, from a strictly material standpoint, but I also know what they in turn caused — a lifelong journey that I am still on.”
In between are several hundred pages that make up that journey, almost all of it through the mostly atheistic philosophers of the Western canon. Unlike a traditional pilgrimage, this book is an odyssey of the mind. Beha debates the old masters: Descartes, Kant, Locke, Mill, Hobbes, Camus, Nietzsche and many, many others, but he starts with a poke at the “New Atheists” Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and the like — all of them now passé, in his view.
Some years ago in these pages, the incomparable journalist Michael Kinsley welcomed Hitchens’s book “God Is Not Great” with a memorable line: “Hitchens is an old-fashioned village atheist, standing in the square trying to pick arguments with the good citizens on their way to church.”
Beha is not a stone thrower or even much of a picker of fights. He reveres the great minds, to an obsessive degree. He’s the guy you wanted as your college roommate in the pre-A.I. era. Or maybe not. He’s done all the reading and even wrote a memoir about it, “The Whole Five Feet,” recounting the year he consumed all 51 volumes of the Harvard Classics series. Just looking at the list makes most of us tired.
He climbed that mountain, so we don’t have to. But, alas, at times in his new book he gets lost in the clouds. Here’s a sample, discussing Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher: “Kant is here invoking two binaries we’ve already discussed. The first is that between a priori and a posteriori truth; the second is that between analysis and synthesis.”
But Beha is sincere, honest and likable on the page. I found his personal story more engaging than his intellectual one. He started to doubt his faith at 18 when he nearly lost his twin brother to a car accident. He suffered from depression and life-threatening cancer, drank too much and took too many drugs. (He was an atheist for a long time.)
The book is built as a long counter to “Why I Am Not a Christian,” a famous essay by the British polymath Bertrand Russell, who called belief in God “a conception quite unworthy of free men.” Russell was one of the minds that nudged Beha into years of committed faithlessness.
Not for Beha was the easy agnosticism of the spiritually homeless, a condition the Catholic comedian Stephen Colbert once likened to little more than being “an atheist without any balls.” He was all in.
Russell’s argument was succinct, taking on each of the major arguments for faith. Beha’s is not. He breaks down the godless worldview into two categories and then spends most of the book elaborating, even sympathizing with each. One is “scientific materialism,” which holds that the material world is all there is. The other is “romantic idealism,” defined by him as creating our own reality.
During his long years in the desert of disbelief, Beha tried to find a place in one of those narratives, seeking to “make a life lived without God a meaningful one.”
Ultimately, atheism failed him, as it did some in the French Revolution who briefly converted the Notre-Dame Cathedral into the spiritually barren Temple of Reason. The religion of nonreligion can be like nonalcohol beer: What’s the point?
Beha is not interested in trying to sway those who’ve given up on God. He simply wants to explain what moved him back to the faith of his fathers, “listening to the whispering voice within our souls.” There’s no Road-to-Damascus conversion. He’s not blinded by the light. It’s more about his often miserable life getting better with the right woman, a Catholic confession, regular attendance at Mass. And that woman — “she was the reason I believed in God” — isn’t even a believer. She’s a lapsed Episcopalian.
If Beha doesn’t necessarily win his argument with Russell, give him credit for following the imperative of all sentient beings — to deeply consider the mystery of ourselves in an unknowable universe.
“I don’t believe I will ever see things clearly; not in this mortal life,” he concludes. “The best we can hope for is to be looking in the right direction, facing the right way.”
WHY I AM NOT AN ATHEIST: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer | By Christopher Beha | Penguin Press | 417 pp. | $30
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