Light On Dark Water

Hitchens, Franklin, and Our Sundered America

I read Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography in high
school. At least I think I did. I’m sure I must have read
at least some of it, because otherwise how would I have such a
vivid memory of disliking it? The doubt comes from the fact that
I remember nothing specific about it, while I remember with
perfect clarity what it was like to read the works of Shakespeare
and Eliot and any number of others that caught my heart, even
ones which I now see are of a lesser order, such as Thornton
Wilder’s Our Town (which may once have been
over-rated but might now, I suspect, be under-rated), and Carl
Sandburg’s poems about Chicago and war and fog. In some of
these cases I can in fact call to mind the look of the pages
themselves, and often the place where I read them: I see
“The Hollow Men,” for instance, laid out in my high
school English textbook, and the book on my desk, and the desk in
the classroom with painted concrete-block walls and some kind of
institutional linoleum flooring, and the window to my left.

But Franklin? I remember only thinking that this was pretty
dry stuff. It was all about being prudent and industrious, all
worldliness and pragmatism. Though I wouldn’t have used
those words at that time, I was able, over the next ten years or
so of reading, in and out of school, to recognize what it was
that I disliked in Franklin and many other American writers: a
rationalistic practicality which seemed to have no eye at all for
the mystery and richness of life.

I never read Franklin again, and having just read Christopher
Hitchens on the Autobiography in the latest issue of
The Atlantic, I doubt that I ever will. The number of
books I want to read or re-read is now so great in proportion to
any reasonable expectation of time remaining to me in which to
read them that it seems unlikely that I will re-visit any of
those with which I have little sympathy.

Mr. Hitchens is, of course, well-known for his detestation of
religion. And if he reads Franklin correctly, he confirms my
adolescent aversion, for he sees the Autobiography as
being filled with a subtle but intense disparagement of
Christianity, and the evidence he brings forward for his view
says to me that Franklin was, as I think more than one of our
founders were, an adherent of a sort of bloodless Whiggery, a
thin and superficial skepticism which, while scoring just points
against religious fanaticism and hypocrisy, leaves me feeling
that I’m listening to a tone-deaf man complaining about the
histrionic gestures of an orchestral conductor. He may be right
that the conductor is a ham and perhaps even something of a sham,
but if he doesn’t understand music, and why someone making
music might be so moved as to seem eccentric, he is no more
than a dog barking at a stranger.

We think of the American conflict between the irreligious and
the believer as a relatively new thing, and it is newly virulent
and now impossible to ignore, but in truth it has been there
since the beginning. Most American writers and intellectuals have
been at least quietly skeptical and often openly hostile to
religion—meaning, specifically, Christianity—all
along. My own sense, which pre-dates my conscious conversion, that
the religious mind sees more deeply into things is most of the
reason why I preferred English literature to American and never
could bring myself to read much of Emerson and Thoreau. It was
not that the English writers of the same period were more
religious, only that they understood the issue: a writer like
Carlyle knew what it meant for England to lose her religion.

Of course the religion which Franklin, Jefferson, and others
rejected provided plenty of justification for their doing so.
Puritanism was unattractive and difficult to sustain, and where
it ebbed it left an even more unattractive shell. And so the
American soul was split, with skeptical rationalism on the one
hand and narrowness and emotionalism on the other.

The Catholic faith provides space and support for both these
human impulses to fulfill themselves, where rationalism need not
finally fling itself into the void and emotional fervor need have
no fear of the facts, for it is perfectly justified by them.
Although I can’t say it seems likely, it does sometimes
seem possible that the future of the USA, or at least of its
Christianity, is a Catholic future.