CHAMBERS ON THE JUDEO- CHRISTIAN GOD AND FREEDOM

While all ex-Communists would agree they renounced Communism to be free, for Chambers, freedom itself is a manifestation of divinity.

Freedom is a need of the soul, and nothing else.

And when Chambers made his dramatic assertion to an inquisitorial panel of largely hostile journalists, during a live August 27, 1948, radio broadcast of Meet the Press, that, “Alger Hiss was a Communist and may still be one,”¹¹¹ he recounts in Witness:

I like to believe that some who heard it, heard at the same instant, its inward meaning. That meaning was that God, Who is a God of Mercy, is also the God of Whom it is written: “The God Who made iron grow—He wanted no slaves.”¹¹²

Chambers was convinced that man's most worthy imperative was the ceaseless endeavor to know God.

[M]an is driven by the noblest of his intuitions—the sense of his mortal incompleteness—and by hard experience. For man's occasional lapses from God-seeking inevitably result in intolerable shallowness of thought combined with incalculable mischief in action.¹¹³

In this latter conviction, he shared Dostoevsky's Weltanschauung, dramatized, as Chambers remarks, on a “titanic scale” as tragedy in The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot and as comedy in The Possessed.

Against liberalism's social optimism (progress by reform) and the social optimism of the revolutionary left (progress by force), Dostoevsky asserted the eternal necessity of the soul to be itself.

Chambers's personal practice of religion was nonconformist and eclectic, true to his own assessment, characterized in a September 1954 letter to William Buckley:

The temptation to orthodoxy is often strong, never more than in an age like this one, especially in a personal situation like mine. But it is not a temptation to which I have found it possible to yield.. I stand within no religious orthodoxy.¹¹⁵

Although baptized in an Episcopalian Church (i.e., the Cathedral of St. John the Divine¹¹⁶) after abandoning Communism, Chambers worshipped as a Quaker, but rejected the Quaker's pacifism.¹¹⁷ Nonconformism aside, the salient features of Chambers personal religiosity were his Christian pantheism, philosemitism and accompanying intolerance of racial bigotry, and, however brooding, hope.

Rebecca West's June 1952 Atlantic Monthly review of Witness,¹¹⁸ despite her obvious ambivalence about Chambers's behaviors and beliefs, extolled the autobiography:

[S]o just and so massive in its resuscitation of the past.. Chambers writes as writers by vocation try to write, and he makes the further discoveries about reality, pushing another half-inch below the surface, which writers hope to make when they write.¹¹⁹

Although expressly disinclined toward mystics and mysticism, West accurately represents the mystical tendencies in Chambers's religious belief:

He now owns and works a large and productive farm in those parts [Westminster, Maryland], and his account of the sacrifices that he and his family have made to acquire that farm, and the joy they find in working it, reveals that he belongs to a certain well-recognized order of man. He believes that nature is an aspect of God, and that to grow crops and tend herds is a means of establishing communication with God..

Witness includes Chambers's own beautifully evocative description of his “Christian pantheism,”

captured in this lasting childhood recollection:

One day I wandered off alone and found myself before a high hedge that I had never seen before. It was so tall that I could not see over it and so thick that I could not see through it. But by lying flat against the ground, I wriggled between the provet stems. I stood up, on the other side, in a field covered from end to end, as high as my head, with thistles in full bloom. Clinging to the purple flowers, hovering over them, or twittering and dipping in flight, were dozens of goldfinches—little golden yellow birds with black, contrasting wings and caps. They did not pay the slightest attention to me, as if they had never seen a boy before. The sight was unexpected, the beauty was so absolute, that I thought I could not stand it and held to the hedge for support. Out loud, I said: “God.” It was a simple statement, not an exclamation, of which I would then have been incapable. At that moment, which I remembered through all the years of my life as one of its highest moments, I was closer than I would be again for almost forty years to the intuition that alone could give meaning to my life—the intuition that God and beauty are one.¹²¹

Chambers’s December 1946 Time cover essay on the nonpareil American black contralto Marian Anderson¹²² reveals how his Christian religious belief was philosemitic, and as a corollary, rejected the prevalent racial prejudice of that era.

At Salzburg, backdropped by magical mountains, where Austria's great musical festivals were held before the war, and where he first heard Marian Anderson sing, Arturo Toscanini cried: “Yours is a voice such as one hears once in a hundred years.” Toscanini was hailing a great artist, but that voice was more than a magnificent personal talent. It was the religious voice of a whole religious people—probably the most God-obsessed (and man- despised) people since the ancient Hebrews.

Almost eleven years later, commenting on the Soviet Union’s cynical Middle Eastern policy of exploiting Arab Muslim hatred and paranoia, Chambers reaffirmed these sentiments in an October 1957 essay for The National Review:¹²⁴

Communism advances that disruptive master piece. We all know what it is, though no one likes to mention it. It is the State of Israel. At once, it becomes necessary to define our intentions clearly. A filthy anti-Semitism afflicts many minds in the West. Nothing is gained by denying it. So let us say flatly: in Christendom, no mind can claim to be civilized and, at the same time, be anti­Semitic, any more than an American mind can claim to be civilized and be anti-Negro. For all Christians, regardless of creed, the Vatican has defined the position once for all: “Spiritually, we are Semites.” Moreover, an immense compassion—mere goodwill is too genderless a term—before the spectacle of the Jewish tragedy in our century, must move our hourly understanding of what the

State of Israel means in terms of hope fired by such suffering. Let us be quite sure we know this. For it is also necessary to look at Israel in terms of Middle East reality. Communism may lose friendly Egypt or Syria; it will look for purchasable pawns elsewhere. It is Israel, as an enemy, that Communism cannot afford to lose.

Chambers’s relentless pursuit of truth in all matters, was prone to despairing conclusions. Yet his ultimate vision—imbued with religious faith—was one of hope. As a patient with chronic coronary artery disease (“angina”), Chambers sustained several nonfatal myocardial infarctions (“heart attacks”), prior to his July 1961 death from a fatal heart attack.¹²⁶ While recuperating from a November 1952 heart attack in Baltimore’s St. Agnes Hospital, Chambers encountered a Passionist monk, Father Alan, whom he sensed was a kindred spirit.¹²⁷ Seeking truth “greedily,” since “truth alone is felt to offer one austere, stripped hand-hold across a chasm,” Chambers decides to “cut through the careful irrelevancies of our talk,”¹²⁸ query Father Alan, and gauge who he was.

I asked: “Father, what am I to answer those people who keep writing me that I was wrong to write in ‘Witness’ that I had left the winning side for the losing side? They say by calling the West the losing side, I have implied that evil can ultimately overcome good.” Father Alan studied his hands, which were lying in his lap. Then he glanced at me directly and asked: “Who says that the West deserves to be saved?”¹²⁹

Acknowledging the objections to such “unreasonably bleak” views, Chambers penultimate essay in Cold Friday sees hope—on his terms—in the mid to late 1950s Eastern European revolts against Communist oppression.

In this age, hope is something that must be taken by the throat. That is to say, hope, to be durable and real, must begin with things exactly as they are, not as we suppose they were (even a few tranquillizing months ago), or as we wish they might be..

And Chambers concludes, appositely, with this stirring mystical vision of religious hope.

Put out of your mind so far as you can—at least in the way that a judge instructs a jury to put out of its mind a scrap of testimony that it has, nevertheless, plainly heard —what weighs and presses on us. The political revolution which reaches out for us. The scientific revolution. Put out of your mind for a moment the thermonuclear fear, the rocketry and the terrors that lie beyond. Under this appalling, dwarfing mass that troubles us—troubles us all the more because most of it we see the way an animal's eye sees us at night, as shapeless patches of the darker dark—under this leaning overhang lives man: people in our undifferentiated millions, bounded by our household cares and happinesses, the fathers and mothers of children, grandfathers and grandmothers of grandchildren in whom we see the continuation of a pulse that began with the Creation.¹³¹