The Quest for God: A Personal Pilgrimage. - book reviews

National Review, July 15, 1996 by David Klinghoffer

FOR conservatives, the importance of Paul Johnson's new book is demonstrated not by comparing it to similar books -- of which, by current writers, there are few -- but by considering something apparently unrelated: the barely detectable conservative effort to fend off legalized gay marriage.

As most of us sense, the real reason to oppose gay marriage is simply that God opposes it. In Leviticus, He warned the Israelites to shun the "practices" of the Egyptians and the Canaanites, if they wanted to avoid getting ejected from the Holy Land, and the Talmud records that one of those practices was to allow men to marry men and women to marry women. If not a Holy Land, America is, or at least once was, a holy land. Just as God watched the Israelites, He is watching us.

Given that the first principle of conservatism is the belief that "a divine intent rules society," as Russell Kirk put it, it is strange that on this issue we have heard little from the Right. On the New York Times op-ed page, Lisa Schiffren had the temerity to invoke "the Judaeo-Christian moral order" against gay marriage, though without mentioning God. To the extent that other conservatives have raised their voices, they have offered lame pragmatic arguments about the effects on straight marriage and on children raised by gay parents.

This is merely a symptom of a more pervasive shyness. Conservative politicians and intellectuals speak impressively about the need for a moral, even a religious revival in this country, and about their schemes to ignite such a revival, designated by such jargon terms as "communitarianism," "Victorian virtues," or "Civil Society." In fact they will expound on every possible catalyst but God Himself. Which is why, so far, our words have been in vain. As Rabbi Daniel Lapin points out, the most effective way to get other people to take God, and thus morality, seriously, is to talk about Him in a serious way yourself, in public. That we will not do.

To this rule, Mr. Johnson emerges as a welcome exception. His main point is that, although the history of the past century or so has been in large part the history of men trying to find substitutes for God, there is no satisfactory substitute: not because, as hedge-betting conservatives seem to think, inherently violent, chaotic man needs to believe in a fictitious Lord who will rein in his evil impulse; but because God lives. Johnson recalls a chilling conversation he overheard between a journalist and an Oxford philosopher. The journalist had invoked the "sanctity of life" and the philosopher had asked her to "Prove it to me. Why should human life be sacred?" A "number of beliefs to do with behavior and morality and civilization" which we consider self-evident today, writes Johnson, may not seem self-evident as the next millennium progresses. That self-evidence needs to be re-established, and the useful-fiction God favored by media-friendly moralists can provide no help in re-establishing it.

Once the decision has been made to talk about God as a living entity, what does one say about Him? Johnson has several good ideas. He tries to clear away some of the rubble that has been thrown down in the street on the way to God.

Take the problem of theodicy, of justifying God's goodness despite the worldly triumph of evil. This is a tough challenge, to which Johnson offers an appealingly modest answer: "Our understanding, compared to God's infinite knowledge and wisdom, is so puny that it seems to me hazardous to set ourselves up in judgment over God's righteousness. . . . I am content to believe that no one who innocently suffers here on Earth will be without full and ample recompense in Heaven."

Johnson himself came to God because he was properly educated on the subject: above all by his father, a sturdy English Catholic who taught art and who taught his young son that we can know God through His works. Johnson became an amateur artist himself and when, with great effort, he had mastered the challenge of drawing trees, the accomplishment had a spiritual reward: "at long last I began to understand how God designed them, and how it was their functional efficiency which made them works of natural art."

But those who cannot draw need not despair. As a route to the experience of transcendence, Johnson recommends prayer, and includes an inspiring summons to pray daily, especially the Psalms. Imagine that: a conservative intellectual advocating prayer for adults.

Throughout, Johnson writes with his usual stout, unapologetic relish, with a clarity and a concreteness that never fail to please or to inform. Anyone who has a hard time understanding why a man would love God, or love an institution devoted to God, should read this book. In a beautiful image, Johnson pictures God as a Being so devoted to His creation that the fate even of a blade of grass concerns him.

As for the church in which Johnson learned to worship this Deity, his affection toward it could not be more warmly expressed. He comes from a part of England, north Lancashire, that never went Protestant, so Catholicism for him is an exceedingly old family possession, like "a much-loved old teddy bear or a favorite armchair or a smelly old favorite dog." He is not one of those Catholics who think their church evacuated its history and calling at Vatican II. What matters most to him remains firmly in place: