Christopher Hitchens died last night, December 15th, at the age of 62. The New York Times obituary provides a nice overview of his legacy:
Armed with a quick wit and a keen appetite for combat, Mr. Hitchens was in constant demand as a speaker on television, radio and the debating platform, where he held forth in a sonorous, plummily accented voice that seemed at odds with his disheveled appearance. He was a master of the extended peroration, peppered with literary allusions, and of the bright, off-the-cuff remark.
I often found Hitchens to be infuriating, but there was never any doubt about his intelligence and wit, which he was always more than happy to put to the service of cutting down ideas and individuals that he viewed with scorn.
And Hitchens did scorn well. To find oneself or one's ideas subject to his withering fusillades of rhetorical fire was never a pleasant experience, and yet, it was always possible to read something that he wrote, or hear him speak and find oneself amused and drawn in by his wit and style even when one deeply disagreed with his characterizations.
Of course, I never had the opportunity to meet Hitchens in person, nor was I ever personally the target of his acid tongue, but I would often use his arguments in classes and in my writing as exemplars of the neo-atheist stance that's gained such traction in recent years. Hitchens was clearly one of its most eloquent and interesting defenders, and it was always well worth listening to him, if for no other reason than to understand the state of the argument as seen through the eyes of Hitch.
That said, he was never really interested in having a discussion on the issue of religion. It was not for him an area of open inquiry or academic curiosity. As was quite clear from the subtitle of his book, God Is Not Great, he viewed religion as a force that poisoned everything. Thus he dedicated much of the final decade of his life engaged in a pitched battle with religion of all kinds, not out of a desire to examine the possibilities or quietly consider whether his opponents had a point somewhere along the line, but rather out of a desire to defeat and destroy a force that he understood to be a pernicious plague upon humanity, and a barrier to its capacity for peace and freedom.
In his final piece for Vanity Fair, written shortly before his death, Hitchens reflected on the experience of dying, and the capacity that it has for taking the airy glibness from our contemplation of mortality. He wrote:
Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to “do” death in the active and not the passive sense. And I do, still, try to nurture that little flame of curiosity and defiance: willing to play out the string to the end and wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span. However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”
Glibness is a good defense against overwhelming fear. As I've often (perhaps too often) quipped when being told how dangerous a course of action I'm contemplating might be: I've got do die of something. Which is of course true. But what you die of and how you die of it can make a great deal of difference to the process of dying.
There is a part of me that had hoped Hitchens might open himself up to at least the mere possibility of God's existence, and perhaps even love, in the final days of his life. But from what I know of Hitchens, to have done that would have been for him a betrayal of some of his most deeply held convictions. After that final Vanity Fair article sparked rumors of a possible Hitchens deathbed conversion, The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:
Hitchens also said that if information emerged that he had, at some late stage, made a statement of faith, or a religious confession, including but not limited to, "I accept Jesus as my lord and savior," or, "Muhammad, peace be unto him, is the messenger of God," or, "the Lubavitcher rebbe is the true messiah and currently living in Brooklyn," that his friends were to make it known that it was not the true Hitchens doing the confessing. This is what he told me once, during a video conversation we posted on this website: "The entity making such a remark might be a raving, terrified person whose cancer has spread to the brain," he said. "I can't guarantee that such an entity wouldn't make such a ridiculous remark. But no one recognizable as myself would ever make such a ridiculous remark."
And I can admire the clear-eyed courage with which Hitchens embraced his atheism, and I have great respect for that stance. At this stage, of course, Hitchens knows the answers to these mysteries far more deeply now than I do (or he doesn't), and I am sure has made what peace there is to be made with the possibility of an afterlife, or its absence, and the possibility of a God, or of God's non-existence.
As a Christian, I believe that there is a loving God with whom we are destined to dwell in eternity in some form or another. To Hitchens, this would be no better than an eternity in North Korea. And one senses in his narrow and cramped view of God something of Philip Pullman's vision of God from the His Dark Materials novels -- a decrepit and superannuated dictator overseeing our every move and action. This is far different than my vision of God, which is as the ground and guarantor of being, who governs the universe not as a dictator but as the spirit of love that moves through every human heart, and that may itself be the pulse of the universe.
But I can understand why this would not be compelling to Christopher Hitchens. There is much of Ivan Karamazov about his atheism. It is reaction to a repugnant image of God that he has not been able to banish or exorcise. But even were he to arrive in the presence of God and be faced with the truth that everything he had believed was wrong, I suspect that he would, like Ivan, without rancor, refuse the ticket to the afterlife, on the ground that the price asked for admission was too high, costing as it has the untold suffering of so many, and by his lights, possibly also costing him his freedom, even his freedom ultimately to choose damnation if that's his fate. There is a courage about that, I won't deny it, even as I believe that I, on the contrary, would allow myself to be enfolded in the embrace of a loving God.
But as a Christian, I also believe in the persistence of God's love and grace. And I'm not sure that the last word on Hitchens' relationship with God has yet been written. I can well believe that God would continue to support and to sustain, to goad and to persuade, to lead and draw by attraction rather than compulsion, in order to lead Hitchens, and all of us, finally into the divine presence. Even were Hitchens to choose damnation in th face of God, nobody has to believe that such a choice is inevitable or eternal, and a choice for damnation may ultimately become a choice for salvation, given an eternity for the love of God to do its work.
I'm not sure I would go so far as to say that I will miss Hitchens. I didn't know him personally, and did not go out of my way to read his work. But I am sad for his death, and mourn for him, and send my deepest condolences to all of his family and friends. And I do recognize that the world has lost an important critical voice, one that was critical even of idea that I hold sacred. But by holding those ideas up for scrutiny, he has done me and other religious believers a great service, by forcing us to examine our beliefs more closely, think about them more carefully, and embrace them more critically than we otherwise might have. In that regard, I can only say: Thank God for Christopher Hitchens.
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