Great. But how could he, or anyone, know? He and many other atheists, it seemed to me, were thinking of the traditional, anthropomorphic God tied to religion’s dark history, the celestial big daddy whom religious zealots killed for and over, the God who would punish boys if they masturbated and girls if they lost their maidenheads.
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS AND A CODE OF ONE’S OWN
As a college student, I decided I could create my own set of commandments. I had read all of Ernest Hemingway and realized that, in spite of the nihilistic view found in his powerful short stories and his novels such as A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises, there was an appealing code. At least it appealed to me. Or, I should say, parts of it did. Despite all the blustering machismo and small-minded prejudices in his work, the Hemingway code was rooted both in the idea of showing grace under pressure and in acting in a manly and stoic way in the face of adversity and accepting an existential reality that precluded faith. Though Hemingway exalted the Catholicism he was born into and influenced by, he nevertheless accepted the notion that existence preceded essence, that we create who we are by our choices and actions despite a deterministic universe and regardless of what we are born with, or what, my mother would insist, was ladled out to us by God.
Hemingway also believed one could be drawn into a nearly communal ethos with others who were like one in spirit and sensibility, into the he-or-she-is-one-of-us ethic. When, in The Sun Also Rises, Brett Ashley in effect releases the young bullfighter Romero from her hold, she tells Jake Barnes it’s what they have instead of God. Jakes replies, “Some people have God.…Quite a lot.” Brett says then, “He never worked very well with me,” and Jake responds by suggesting they have another martini. In Hemingway’s world we are connected to those we like, and who are like us, by pleasures such as liquor and a stoic view of life, by a code and commitment to a life of action, by a belief in a here and now without frills. Life is a quest for transient pleasure and courage, where we must accept the one and only predetermined certainty — our fragile mortality.
Other writers too — philosophers and poets — provided me with a tentative and evolving blueprint as I planted myself in the world of ideas and embraced the life of the mind. Albert Camus especially affected me with his notion that the only valid philosophical question was whether to commit suicide. The quest for knowledge itself became an integral part of my developing code, and I absorbed as much as I could from great writers, philosophers, and poets. If I was to have a higher purpose or a sudden blitzkrieg of faith, it would have to enter without being wished for. It would have to be genuine, convincing. I continued to long for that kind of certainty, a certainty that I knew only a form of spiritual sustenance could provide. But in the meantime I settled on the idea of developing a code based on my Jewish cultural traditions and on what I derived from the writers, like Hemingway, and existentialist thinkers, like Camus, that I was intellectually drawn to and who believed in the power of the human will. I was convinced, by the age of nineteen, that once death arrived, it meant the end of consciousness, the big and lasting sleep.
I came remarkably close to dying, in fact, in a speeding car driven by a liquor-swigging fellow student named Dave, who lost control one night on a slick wintry Ohio turnpike as a giant rig bore down on us. It was astonishing how narrowly we escaped death’s jaws. I saw the truck’s lights glaring directly at me and was sure my life was about to end — until I realized we’d skidded off the road and flopped into a huge snowdrift on the side of the turnpike, which had only recently been plowed. I crawled out first and stood watching as Dave rushed out of the driver’s seat and buried his flask in the high snow that had miraculously cushioned his car. He then fell to the ground and kissed it.
In the instant when I had stared into the truck’s lights and believed my doom was sealed, I had thought that I, at nineteen, would barely have an obituary. A sentence or two would sum up my life. It seemed as if the experience of coming so perilously close to death should have set off in me a charge for God, gratitude for life and for having suffered no physical harm. But by that point, only a year after the Cuban missile crisis had knocked me to my knees, something had shifted.
I was more of an agnostic at this time, although I still couldn’t fully embrace the word. Standing in the snow I thanked God for saving me from collision with the rig, but I did it in a mealymouthed, automatic way. I was certain that, had I been killed, I would not have entered an afterlife. My doubts about such concepts as an afterlife had become too strong, stronger than my previous willingness to accept the comforting notion of a life or form of ongoing consciousness after death, some soul transmigration or ascent of the soul to a higher reward or descent to punishment. I was with Dylan Thomas on this: “After the first death there is no other.”
Nevertheless, belief in God was another matter. Faith-based existentialists like Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Buber, and great thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre who denied the existence of a higher power, had already imprinted me with their ideas, as had poets like Thomas and a myriad of other writers and thinkers I greedily ingested. All of them had contributed to the life philosophy I was formulating. Ideas had begun to percolate in me, assisted by my ambitious reading and my desire to form a code that fit my personal, evolving brand of agnosticism. This code recognized no afterlife, no involvement by God in human affairs, and included my own doubts about God and the Ten Commandments. It wasn’t that I found anything objectionable about the Ten Commandments or about making them the guide-posts for my life. But the first four were connected intimately to a God I had come to question, and the other six seemed too absolute. A code birthed in agnosticism, I was beginning to realize, had little relationship to absolutes.
I had been troubled early on by the absoluteness of the prohibitions in the Ten Commandments. Even as a boy I had doubted that the commandment not to kill fit every instance. Did it really apply to battle or to self-defense? Was it all right to kill a figure like Hitler or Stalin to prevent mass slaughter of others? What about the killing done by the state in response to heinous crimes? And what about the killing of animals?
These questions provided fodder for late-night adolescent debates, and for later discussions that would metamorphose into more serious and weighty moral analysis. They are the questions of one who questions. They can lead, ultimately, to confusion and indecision, even to the comedic. Was there, I asked my students decades later in a literature class I was teaching, an ethical imperative not to eat meat because to do so meant animals had to be killed? Plants at the time were being heralded as living creatures that supposedly exhibited responses to human touch and sound. They were, at any rate, life-forms, and they too had to be killed if humans were to eat. One could, I noted to my class, limit one’s diet to fruit, but that would mean complicity in abortion. So, I concluded, to be absolutely moral, one had to not eat.
And what of the absoluteness of the commandment not to steal? You cannot read Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables without recognizing the injustice done to poor Jean Valjean when he is forced to serve nineteen years in jail for stealing a loaf of bread to survive. And yet, we were commanded by the highest power never to steal. How absolute was that commandment? Or, for that matter, any commandment?
As a kid I took the commandment against stealing seriously and refused to go along with my pals who urged me to be their partner in swiping clothes from Cleveland’s May Company or cigarettes from the corner pharmacy. “Klepto,” I called one kid who seemed to take inordinate pride in what he could steal. He was cunning enough to get away with a lot of petty heists. Why, I wondered, wasn’t he being punished? I chummed around for a while with another guy, whom we called Jake the Thief. I thought he was a colorful character, and he went out of his way to win my approval, which flattered my boyish ego. But we all knew he stole things from people’s homes, even the homes of his supposed friends and neighbors. My dad put it best one day when he said to me of Jake: “Your friend has larceny in his heart.” And Jake, whose father was a bookie, predictably found himself, as the years progressed, in serious trouble for check forgery, trouble that he managed somehow to weasel out of. What, I wondered after Jake’s arrest, would be the ultimate punishment for