The Age of Atheists

Starred review from February 15, 2014
As humanity (limited here to Western humanity) was losing the sense of certainty that came with a belief in God, with Nietzsche famously pronouncing His death, what was to fill that spiritual void? This is the enormous question tackled by English intellectual historian Watson. How have thinkers, artists, and others in a secular age sought to anchor humanity in relation to the universe? Watson's breathtakingly vast coverage ranges chronologically from the immediate post-Nietzschean generation to the present, and culturally across an immense canvas, an encyclopedic who's who in twentieth-century arts and sciences (and more) somehow confronting a spiritual vacuum in a period marked by two world wars, the Holocaust, a multitude of other horrors, and the atomic age. American poet Wallace Stevens thought that in an age when God is dead, the arts in general, and poetry in particular, must take over. What was created were not only lasting works of art but also, in aggregate, an antitheology theology. Watson's theme seems to be that an astonishingly broad spectrum of manifestations of the human spirit, in a human community, ground us in a less-certain world. His style, like many of those he discusses, can be recondite, but Watson's encompassing treatment of a difficult subject, in a world growing no less uncertain, is impressive and, ultimately, reassuring.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)