According to Richard J. Evans, the late communist historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) fell in love with nature. Nature’s God, however, found no place either in his heart or his thoughts, at least not his published ones.
In 1935, Evans wrote, Hobsbawm (then in his late teens) “felt a sudden, ill-defined”
. . . longing [Hobsbawm journaled]. For what? Perhaps for the fields, strong, red, deep fields, and broad, warm meadows. Or for the dead-silent woods at night. Or for the great sea, soft, lightly swelling its weight, shining benignly red and silver in the evening. I want to lie down peacefully, very softly, under the great sun. In the wondrous, deep sun. I want to be still, completely still, and lie there until I fall asleep, in the sun, in the warm grass.[1]
Whence, however, the object of this rapturous longing? An explosion of matter and energy indifferent to Hobsbawm and his loves, a happy but accidental product of planetary and hominid “evolution,” one by-product of which was Hobsbawm’s psychological report that has no significance beyond itself.
The heavens—and, by extension, nature—declare the glory of God (Psalm 19), but Hobsbawm’s materialism rules out such expressions of reverence and gratitude. The heavens declare nothing. In nature’s beauty, Hobsbawm found respite from his academic and political toils, but never a reason to question his atheism. It was a brute fact, one to be enjoyed, perhaps, but certainly also taken for granted.
Hobsbawm would be “still,” as God desires us all to be, but never, as far as we know, affirm Him in that stillness. (Psalm 46:10) Hobsbawm knew God, but suppressed that knowledge (Romans 1), even though in it lay the root of the intelligibility of everything he professed to know and love throughout his long life. He had no grounds for proclaiming autobiographically, as he did at age 85:
What made Marxism so irresistible was its comprehensiveness. “Dialectical materialism” provided, if not a “theory of everything,” then at least a “framework of everything,” linking inorganic and organic nature with human affairs, collective and individual, and providing a guide to the nature of all interactions in a world of constant flux.[2]
“So, Flood, why do you care about Hobsbawm?”
I care, because the questions he raised as a young man a century ago in Europe between the Wars remind me of those I raised half that long ago in the Bronx. The man helping me answer them was Hobsbawm’s contemporary, the American Stalinist historian, Herbert Aptheker.[3] In my case, God countermanded my suppression of the truth; not in Hobsbawm’s.
And that liberation was entirely of grace. It was nothing for me to boast about. (Ephesians 2:9)
Notes
[1] Richard J. Evans, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History, Oxford University Press, 2019, 62. To my visitors who don’t make time for this 800-pager, I recommend Gabriel Winant, “A Diaspora of One,” Jewish Currents, July 29, 2019; Corey Robin, “Eric Hobsbawm, the Communist Who Explained History,” The New Yorker, May 9, 2019; and Susan Pedersen, “I Want to Love it,” London Review of Books, April 18, 2019.
[2] Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life, Pantheon, 2002, 97. It is a fatally flawed framework, as all secular alternatives to the Christian worldview must be. See my Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him, independently published, 2022.
[3] When the Soviet Union crushed the 1956 Hungarian uprising, it no more occurred to Hobsbawm to leave the Communist Party of Great Britain than it did to Aptheker to leave the CPUSA. Hobsbawm defended Moscow outright, identifying “fascism” as a clear and present danger. The “suppression of a popular movement,” Hobsbawm wrote, “however wrong-headed, by a foreign army is at best a tragic necessity and must be recognized as such. While approving, with a heavy heart, of what is now happening in Hungary, we should therefore also say frankly that we think the USSR should withdraw its troops from the country as soon as possible.” (Quoted in Evans, Hobsbawm, 343) At least he didn’t develop his casuistry into a book-length apologetic like Aptheker’s The Truth about Hungary, Mainstream Publishers, 1957. (The link opens a PDF of this book, courtesy of the Espresso Stalinist.) See my Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness, independently published, 2019.