Bertrand Russell is widely regarded as the greatest philosopher of the Twentieth Century, and as one of the greatest philosophers of all time. He was a brilliant mathematician, who, along with Alfred North Whitehead, laid the foundations for mathematical logic in the seminal book Principia Mathematica. (No, I haven't read that one. Please don't ask me to read it. After a few glances, I realised that I would have to spend several years studying logic before I could begin to understand it. ) He was also a polished literary stylist, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. What he is most famous for, perhaps, is his atheism and his criticisms of Christianity, as exemplified is his most famous book, Why I am not a Christian. During the later part of his long life (he was born in 1872 and died in 1970) he campaigned for nuclear disarmament and against the Vietnam War.
His autobiography, which was published in three volumes, covers all these topics in detail, along with details about his four marriages and his extramarital affairs. Pretty heady stuff for a fourteen year old boy!
But I looked up to him and thought he was right in his rejection of religion.
Listen to him as he describes what has guided his life: "Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very edge of despair." When I read that, I sensed a kindred soul.
He grew up, lonely and misunderstood, and I felt his loneliness. His adolescent doubts, written in Greek letters so that his family could not read them, finally resulted in a total rejection of any belief in God by the time he reached eighteen. I sympathised with him on that issue as well. I had already told my father when I was thirteen that I did not believe in God. Thenceforth I had resolved to live life in a universe without God. I would fill my days with literature and poetry and the thoughts of the great, but that would be all the meaning that I would expect from life.
But how lonely and unhappy I was! How wrapped up in my own little life!
And Bertrand Russell did not strike me as a very happy man either. His first marriage, though it continued for several terrible years, effectively ended when he found out that he no longer loved his wife. He discovered this while he was riding his bicycle. My fourteen-year-old self strove to understand what this could possibly mean. Maybe I still don't understand it now. Later marriages turned out to be as unsuccessful. It was only when he reached his eighties that he found happiness and stability in his fourth marriage.
There was much in Bertrand Russell's autobiography that my adolescent self could not understand, but as I read all three volumes, I began to feel disillusioned. In spite of his brilliance, I began to realise that he had no more understanding of life's mysteries than I had.
In his Free's Man's Worship he wrote about building life on "a firm foundation of unyielding despair". I could not accept that then, any more than I can accept it now. If I believed that, I would have to live a life filled with amusements and selfish pursuits, all in a vain effort to not think about the meaninglessness of it all. Life cannot be lived without hope, not real life.
And he knew that, too. Read what he wrote in one of his letters, written during the First World War: "The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain - a curious wild pain - a searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfigured and infinite - the beatific vision - God - I do not find it, I do not think it is to be found - but the love of it is the love of my life - it's like passionate love for a ghost. At times it fills me with rage, at times with wild despair, it is the source of gentleness and cruelty and work - it fills every passion that I have - it is the actual spring of life within me." What an astonishing statement for someone of his convictions!
But how true. Mostly true, I would say. The rage and the despair and the cruelty come from resisting the transfigured and infinite: what he also calls the beatific vision. They don't come from the vision itself, certainly not from God, whom he mentions by name. It is interesting to see the contradiction in his life: his whole being is searching for something that he does not believe exists. How can something that is the love of his life and the spring of life within him not exist? He was torn in two...like I was.
I would have to look elsewhere for answers to my deepest yearnings. It was moving to read the biography of his daughter, Catherine Tait: "My Father, Bertrand Russell." She was raised up as an atheist, but became a Christian later on in life. She talks about trusting him to God's care, knowing that God loved him more than she did and would do what was best for him. Much as she loved her father, his answers did not satisfy her either.
There was more to life than art and intellectual pursuits, more than even friendship or love. I began to realise that, and after reading Bertrand Russell's autobiography, I put it aside.
