01-04-2008 - Traces, n. 4

NewWorld / culture

Do you believe?

by Gregory Wolfe

According to the New York Times, “Antonio Monda is arguably the most well-connected New York cultural figure you’ve never heard of.” That explains a lot. For one thing, it explains how Monda got so many famous writers and film industry people–from Spike Lee to Jonathan Franzen and from Jane Fonda to Arthur Schlesinger Jr.–to talk about God and Religion.

Monda teaches in the Kanbar Institute of Film and Television at New York University. In addition to being a trans-Atlantic film critic, he is a lover of literature, recently founding an annual literary festival held on the Isle of Capri called Le Conversazioni.
Monda is a Christian. In the introduction to Do You Believe?, he identifies himself as “Catholic, Apostolic, Roman.” In his interview questions, he loves to quote G.K. Chesterton and challenges all of his interlocutors to respond to Dostoevsky’s famous comment that “If God doesn’t exist, everything is permitted.”

So it isn’t easy to say why Do You Believe? is such an unsatisfying book. Part of it may come from the fact that his interviewees seem chosen at random. Why, for example, did he not choose to talk with or about some of the greatest living writers who are known for their profound efforts to fathom the mystery of God–John Updike, say, or Annie Dillard, or the late Czeslaw Milosz?
What we have, instead, is a book of interviews about God in which the vast majority of the contributors have little or no interest in deity. The spectacle of the cheerful Monda trying to evoke any sort of serious reflection from these figures often becomes awkward.
It is a temptation for a person of faith to become indiscriminately critical of the agnosticism or atheism that is prevalent in our high culture. When people feel reticent about facing questions about God and religion, there is undoubtedly a grain of truth in that hesitation. After all, “God talk” comes all too easily to North Americans and many thoughtful human beings have an innate fear of reducing mystery to what Fr. Giussani would call “discourse.”

Along these lines, Saul Bellow puts it most eloquently when he tells Monda that “there are subjects it is impossible to talk about, but that doesn’t mean discussion is pointless. Some themes require modesty, respect, I would even say fear....”
But Bellow is in the minority: most of the interviewees simply feel religion is something that “thinking people” have left behind. The prevailing attitude could be summarized as: “I don’t believe in God but I respect those who do–they undoubtedly gain something from their belief.” These agnostics and atheists are nothing if not polite.
One odd theme that runs through this book is that very few of these individuals came from homes where faith was lived intensely. They have not inherited a tradition. Nearly all had either a nominal religious upbringing or were raised by atheists–many of whom were reacting against the horrors of the twentieth century, in particular the Holocaust.
And yet it is the Jews in this volume who strike one as the most thoughtful.

Daniel Liebeskind, a famous architect, argues that “Freedom means being free not only from something but for something. So the relationship to God doesn’t depend on man. Otherwise, freedom would be simply subjection to others.”
Elie Wiesel, responding to the question “How would you define your faith today?” says, “I would use the adjective wounded.... Hasidism teaches that no heart is as whole as a broken heart, and I would say that no faith is as solid as a wounded faith.”

Monda himself occasionally comes off as glib, but he is willing to share judgments that he has made. For example, he says, “Too often, on both sides of the Atlantic, I have come across people who recognize the existence of God, yet confine his presence to a mystery that in fact leaves one free to behave however one sees fit....”

My hope is that he will do another book of interviews, one that at least seeks out those who have a more developed religious sense. In the meantime, reading this book can encourage us to understand our own place as witnesses to a presence.