… has a post up which distinguishes the responses of atheists and Christians when fear-and-trembling-and-sickness-unto-death starts up.

Like many commentators, Linker is moved and meditative at the spectacle of Christopher Hitchens talking with his characteristic candor about death.

Linker cautions us to expect no deathbed conversions from a confirmed atheist like Hitchens. When immediately threatened with suffering and extinction, atheists might be tempted, as Primo Levi once was, at Auschwitz, to beg for divine intervention; but Linker quotes Levi writing that if he had given in to this, he would have felt ashamed. It would have been a betrayal of the truth.

For the religious, Linker suggests, moments of deep anguish are precious epiphanic events that transport us to the truth of our fragile humanity, and our related dependence on God to grant meaning and transcendence to an otherwise pointless, debilitated, and unredeemed existence. For non-believers, on the other hand:

… [A] person’s capacity to determine the truth depends on his or her ability to think calmly, coolly, dispassionately. It depends on the capacity to bracket aspects of one’s subjectivity (like intense emotions, including fear of imminent death) that might distort one’s judgment or obstruct the effort to achieve an unbiased, objective view of the world in itself.

Religious people tend to believe that “human beings are truest to themselves — most authentic — when they are most vulnerable.” For “the champion of rational enlightenment, the secular intellectual and social critic,” on the other hand, episodes of naked vulnerability represent reversions to the animal incomprehension and fear ever at work beneath our efforts toward understanding.

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While this seems to me broadly speaking a useful distinction, it overlooks some important things. It presents too stark an either/or. If you consider secular intellectuals and artists like Hitchens, Richard Rorty, and Vladimir Nabokov, say, you discover that they seem impelled as much by a profound Romanticism as by reason.

On the edge of his own death, Rorty wrote that “reason can only follow paths that the imagination has first broken.”

Family members, Rorty reports, have asked him if, at this moment of greatest vulnerability, he has felt the pull of religious faith.

No. Neither philosophy nor religion seems to provide ballast.

…[N]either the philosophy I had written nor that which I had read seemed to have any particular bearing on my situation. I had no quarrel with Epicurus’s argument that it is irrational to fear death, nor with Heidegger’s suggestion that ontotheology originates in an attempt to evade our mortality. But neither ataraxia (freedom from disturbance) nor Sein zum Tode (being toward death) seemed in point.

Only poetry comforts and clarifies. Rorty repeatedly recites certain lines to himself:

Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life,
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

Calming but wholly human mantras, these, that take one intimately to what Hitchens in his autobiography calls “the fragility of love.” They pull us back from the precipice, at least emotionally, and strengthen us in the anticipation of our descent.

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Hitchens recently quoted — somewhat misquoted, but who cares — E.M. Forster: “Get on with your own work, and behave as if you were immortal.”

When you can’t get away with doing that anymore, it’s time to gather in to yourself your essential identity, an identity you share with many other people whose “temple,” Forster also writes (quoting him correctly here), “is the holiness of the Heart’s affections, and [whose] kingdom, though they never possess it, is the wide-open world.”