Darkness, beauty, and belief

MARY REICHARD: Hello, and thank you for joining us for a special edition of The World and Everything in It. I’m Mary Reichard.

I'm joined today by best-selling author and podcaster Andrew Klavan. Klavan spent an earlier part of his life as a screenwriter and crime novelist. So he knows a thing or two about storytelling. In his 40s, he converted from agnosticism to Catholicism. And these days he’s exploring stories that do not shy away from darkness, but also point us toward hope.

To that end, his latest book is called The Kingdom of Cain, Finding God in the Literature of Darkness. It's a deep look at how even the grimmest of stories can reveal light, truth, and beauty. And it’s worth adding that though that is the focus of our conversation, there are some parts of this discussion that you might not want younger ears to hear.

So Andrew, welcome. It's great to have you with us.

ANDREW KLAVAN: Thank you, thanks for having me, I appreciate it.

REICHARD: The one line out of the whole book that stuck with me the most was on page 107. It says: “the long withdrawing tide of faith is the central event of our time.” The collapse of the Christian moral order would inevitably follow from that. What's your more recent evidence of this decline?

KLAVAN: Well, I think it's all around us, the actual decline in church attendance and the actual rise in people who identify as none of the above when asked for their religious affiliation. But more importantly than that, I think is the kind of takeover of our intellectual space by people who think things that could only possibly be true if there were no God, that men can become women, that morality is relative, that there's no such thing as truth or beauty.

I mean these are things that have been taught in our universities since I was a lad, which is almost the Jurassic period at this point. I think that they, until very, very recently, they were the dominant intellectual strain, not just in America, but all throughout the West. And so that's what I'm talking about. I mean, it's been, when Nietzsche said God is dead, that's what he was talking about.

The line that you quote is from a poem called Dover Beach, a famous poem about the fact that faith was leaving the world like a tide pulling out. And so I think that the proof of that is everywhere around us and hopefully it will turn around, but it's going to take quite a movement for that to happen.

REICHARD: Mm hmm. You describe in general some very heinous murders in real life and in art. Let’s talk about Cain and Abel, the first murder that we know about. Why does the story of Cain and Abel still hold such spiritual weight in understanding evil today?

KLAVAN: The murder of Abel by Cain is the first thing that happens after the fall of man. it's the beginning of history. And it sets the tone of history in the same way if you're traumatized in your childhood, that trauma can repeat and repeat throughout your life. The brother battle is the whole story of the Old Testament. One generation after another is engaged in a brother trying to seize power from the other brother. And all the themes that go into that: envy, inner strife, the kind of idea that...murder in some way as a kind of suicide, kind of killing of your own soul. All of those themes are involved in the murder of Cain and Abel. It's an incredibly profound moment in history and one that just repeats over and over again.

REICHARD: You wrote of Sigmund Freud's influence and then also all of the atheist philosophers and you concluded that they couldn't make any sense of the moral order. So how did you come to that conclusion?

KLAVAN: In my youth, I had a terrible bout of depression and mental disorder. And I went into therapy, I was close to suicide. I was very seriously considering it. I went to therapy. And by what I now consider a miracle, I was utterly cured. I walked in suicidal, I came out happy, productive, at peace with myself. I've never actually seen that happen to anyone else except drug addicts, which I wasn't, you know, people who have actually come over, overcome some horrible affliction. But it was a 180 degree turnaround.

And so at that point, even though I always sort of felt I was agnostic, I didn't know whether there was a God or not, at that point, because Freud was such an ardent atheist, I thought, well, I owe it to this philosophy that has saved my life, that I thought had saved my life, that I should become an atheist. And I started reading atheist philosophy. But because I had read a very, very dark novel called Crime and Punishment about an axe murder when I was 19, I was absolutely convinced that morality was not relative, that you had to make an argument that some things are just wrong. When you read the axe murder in Crime and Punishment, you just think to yourself, no, there's no planet on which this is right.

And I remember reading this when I was 19 years old and my eyes filling with tears as I read it. She says to him, what have you done to yourself? What have you done to yourself? And I think that the reason we focus on the murderer is because we identify with the murderer. It's easier for us to identify with the murderer than with the victim. And when you take somebody inside the world of a murderer in truth, not in a phony way, but in truth, you start to answer that question. What have you done to yourself? You've cut yourself off from love, you've cut yourself off from God, you've cut yourself off from meaning.

I think if you remove that novel from my life, I'm not sure I would be a Christian today. I think that book actually turned the prow of my life in a new direction. And that's why I'm such a supporter of the literature of darkness, because I think that it's only in confronting darkness that non-believers and believers can understand just how beautiful the light is.

So I was looking for an atheist who could make sense of the fact that there was a moral order. And every atheist philosopher I read did not make sense of that and didn't make sense. And I kept searching for it. And finally I came upon the work of the Marquis de Sade, who is the psychopath from whom we get the word sadism. And his work is sadistic pornography interspersed with brilliant philosophy. Why is it okay to torture somebody for your own pleasure? And I read that and I thought that is the first atheist philosophy that actually holds together. Because what de Sade said is there's no God, therefore there is no morality. Therefore you should do whatever gives you pleasure. And in nature, the powerful overcome the weak. So why wouldn't you take pleasure in being the powerful and torment the weak? I thought, that makes sense, but it's hell. It's horrific. And so I made the only leap of faith I ever made in my journey to God, which is I thought, I believe that that's wrong.

I believe there's a moral order. I believe no matter where you are, no matter what the people around you believe, no matter what country you're in, no matter what planet you're in, torturing somebody for your own pleasure is wrong. And I can't prove that's true, but I know it's true. That's what's called an axiom. Every philosophy begins with an axiom, something you can't prove, but on which everything else depends. And from that point on, there was no way for me to avoid the conclusion that there is a God, that there is an overseer of the moral order, because in order for there to be a moral order, there must be some consciousness that approves of things and disapproves of other things.

REICHARD: I want to return to something you mentioned about the Marquis de Sade. In his way of thinking, in nature, the powerful overcome the weak, so why wouldn't you take pleasure in being the powerful and torment the weak?

Well, it terrified me to read that because as a person who moves through the world in the female incarnation, I'm always the weaker one compared to a man. So I would hope that there is a moral order. Otherwise if we’d gone the way of the Marquis de Sade, women would always be killed.

KLAVAN: Well, that's right. And you know, this is the amazing thing. It was really only through Christianity that people started to think, well, maybe just because a woman can be overpowered doesn't mean she should be. You know, that was an actual Christian thought up until that time. Power really gave you, you know, in the Roman Empire, for instance, power gave you the right to take anybody who was less powerful than you are. And this whole idea that women's rights just drop upon us like the dew from heaven. No, it's actually something that grew out of the philosophy of Jesus Christ. And so, yes, this is the thing. You can be a moral person without believing in God, but you can't make sense.

REICHARD: I think latter day feminism left that out. You've had some criticism about being a Christian and writing about these dark things. So that raised a question in my mind. If hating one's brother is as bad as murder, why explore extreme depravity to show separation from God? Why not stick to something less shocking?

KLAVAN: Because I think that that's where the line is drawn. And I think that the thing that is in some ways illuminating about murder, you know, it's one of the things that God has over the devil is that whatever the devil does actually illuminates the sacred. And one of the things about murder is it because it's so horrific, because we understand right away that it's bad, it makes you think, well, what's bad about it? Why is it bad?

And what's bad about it is the fullness and sacredness of another person. You know, that I think all morality is based on that understanding. Morality is based on my understanding that you are as important to you inside as I am to me inside, and that we are both equally important to God inside. And so I think murder is the absolute statement. It's the absolute dramatization of that sanctity and why, and once you deny that sanctity, you put yourself in a position of having done evil.

REICHARD: That does make sense of it. Along those lines, what do you think about the idea that studying evil is like eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It's sin just dressed up as insight, like bad psychology.

KLAVAN: No, I completely disagree with that. I mean, I'm always having Philippians thrown at me, people saying, you know, should meditate on what's good and noble and true. if that verse, I mean, that's a complicated verse and an interesting one, but if all that means is it's like the song from Peter Pan, you know, think of the happiest things as the same as having wings. You have to remember that Peter Pan never grew up. And if you have a faith that cannot exist in the real world, you are going to lose that faith when the real world confronts you with the kind of suffering and evil that it does confront you with.

That doesn't mean that there's not a way to confront evil that is seductive and destructive. I think that just because I believe that an actual work of art like Psycho, Psycho's a fine movie, can be illuminating even as it's terrifying, that doesn't mean that I think pornography is edifying. I think it's poison. I'm a complete believer in freedom of speech, but if they...outlawed pornography, I wouldn't blink because I just think it's a toxin being pumped into our society.

But that's not true of work that deals seriously with the human nature of evil, with the human nature of lust and greed and all the other things that we all deal with in our hearts. That stuff is not for other people. It's in our hearts. And I think just saying it's not there and I'm not gonna look at it and I'm not going to think about it is actually opening the door to evil because of your own ignorance.

When I look at plays that are about horrible things like Macbeth, is always my best example. It's one of the most beautiful plays ever written, but it's about nihilism, death, betrayal. Every evil that you can think of is in that play. And yet it is a beautiful thing because it actually shows you what evil is and what it does to you, how it separates you from the moral order and therefore separates you from all meaning and all love.

REICHARD: So how do you distinguish between art that is redemptive and art that wallows in evil? What's the line?

KLAVAN: You have to know when you see it. But I think it's kind of easy to know. always tell the story. I was working in Hollywood for a while for my sins. And one company called me in and said, we're going to tell you the story and we want to know how you would write it. And I said, OK. And they said, well, a woman is kidnapped and she's tortured. And I said, yeah. And they said, that's the story. I laughed. Said, yeah, I'm not writing that story. I said, when a woman is being chased on a movie screen by the bad guy, I'm rooting for the woman. You know, I'm writing that story.

You have to know and you and you do know it is really interesting. I mean, that was that story happened to me at a time when something called torture porn was very, very popular in Hollywood. And the whole system was a woman would come on and in some sex scenes she would take off her shirt and we'd see how beautiful she was and then she'd just be ripped apart for the rest of the movie. And I tried because it was so popular, I tried to watch one of these and I thought, I'm not looking at this. This is just like drinking poison. I don't need this. It's very, very different to confront a work of art like Macbeth that delves into terrible, terrible things or...I should mention the Bible, which portrays terrible, terrible things, but portrays them in the context of a moral order. And I think that's the difference. I think that's the difference between, you know, the Bible does that, Shakespeare does that, Dostoevsky does that, all great writers, even good writers do it. And I think that's the big difference.

REICHARD: Mm-hm, so I’m curious: is there a way to determine if art is Christian? If it contains violence or sorrow, what should we make of those elements?

KLAVAN: Well, I believe that all truth is Christian. That's what I believe. And this is one of the things that I think is a shame about the modern world and religion in the modern world, is I think that we put Christianity aside. It's a thing that you do. You go to church on Sunday, you say certain things, and those are Christian things, and other things are not Christian things. I don't actually believe that. I believe that if there is a God, which I think I not only think there is, I have complete faith that there is, that's the center of reality. That's the nature of reality. He is the expression, the reality is an expression of his nature and our moral sense is an expression of his nature.

So I think that any true story is, will, you know, all things work together for those who love God. I think any true story will express God. And that's why I'm not afraid of people who are trying to write nihilist fiction if they're honest, if they're truthful. I think that if people are truthful, if people express life, as it is, even if they write fantasy, even if they write, you know, The Lord of the Rings, it will express God. And that's why I think the arts are misunderstood by Christians.

And so I don't know, the arts are, I keep trying to tell people this and I don't get as far as I'd like to. Christian life and Christian art are two different things. Art that is honest will be Christian art. Someone once asked the great justice, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who was a devout Catholic, what does a Christian judge look like? And he said, he looks like a good judge. And I think that that's what Christian art looks like. It looks like good art.

REICHARD: Hmmmm… You know, Justice Scalia was one of my favorites. But moving on– the murders that you chose to talk about, almost all of them seem to involve sexually confused people, men alienated from masculinity…. Men who kill women and desecrate their bodies to try to get some semblance of femininity for themselves. Do you think that kind of literature has contributed to the rage and the gender confusion we have today?

KLAVAN: No, I think that kind of literature has expressed it and predicted it. I think that the Ed Gein murder, which is the murder that you're talking about, it's the murder that inspired Psycho, it inspired Silence of the Lambs, it inspired an excellent horror movie called The Texas, with the hilarious title The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In spite of that title, it's actually a really good film. And all of the slasher movies from the trashy ones to some good ones, are all inspired by that one murder. And I think the reason it was so powerful, the reason it struck people so powerful is because art actually is predictive of the future if it captures the moment fully.

And I think that gender confusion is built into atheism. It is built into the loss of faith in our culture, where suddenly if you have no faith, if you have no spirit, your body is just a shape, you know, you're femininity is not an inner experience, it's just a body shape. And that's what the story of Silence of the Lambs is about, this guy trying to change his body shape because he thinks it'll turn him into a woman.

And now we have people basically putting on a skirt. They don't even bother to change their body shape and saying, I can go into the girl's locker room, I can play against the girl at sports, and what's the problem here? Are you some sort of bigot that you think that, look at me, I'm wearing a skirt, you think I'm not a girl?

That insanity, that insanity arises directly from atheism and from an atheistic view of the world, which I think was expressed in our over-reliance on therapy. It's not that I'm against therapy, but I think that the atheist therapy put forward by Sigmund Freud had in it the implications that our flesh is just an accidental part of our nature instead of an expression of our souls. And so I think that that I don't think the art contributed to that confusion. I think the art portrayed and predicted that confusion. I think we should have listened to it more carefully.

REICHARD: Predictive literature…interesting. You talk about good art and bad art and you write about Michelangelo’s Pieta–the sculpture showing Mary holding the body of Jesus. What does that depiction of suffering teach us about beauty?

KLAVAN: Well, this to me, this is where the book ends. It ends with the Pietà, which I believe is the most beautiful work of sculpture in the world. I've never seen anything. I've seen a lot of arts all over the world and there's nothing like the Pietà when you confront it. It is such a beautiful thing. When Michelangelo signed the contract for it, the contract said it must be the most beautiful thing ever made in marble. And I thought like, he was a pretty confident guy that he signed that contract and then delivered on it. He delivered the most beautiful thing ever made in marble.

But then stop and think about it. What is it a picture of? It's a picture of a woman with her dead son, Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus. And so it is a picture of the saddest possible thing that can happen to a human being in life, for a mother to lose her child. There is simply nothing sadder or more tragic than that.

And then it goes beyond that since this is the world losing its God for a moment in that moment of death. It's a revelation of our estrangement from God that we would crucify him when we found him, when we saw him right in front of us. It is absolutely the worst moment in human history. And yet, and yet, Michelangelo made it beautiful.

And so when you see that, you know, one of the things that keeps people from believing, I think probably the central thing that keeps people from believing is the question, how can there be an all good, all knowing God when the world is so full of evil? And I don't think all of the usual Christian answers carry the day. The idea of, it's for free will and there has to be evil for there to be free will and the world is broken and Adam and Eve and all this stuff. None of that really helps you when you're in the midst of evil, when you're in the midst of suffering, when you're in the midst of darkness.

But the idea that we might be a small part of a beauty that we can't see, we can't fully comprehend because now we see through a glass darkly, but we'll then see face to face. That to me is the answer, that there is a beauty going on that involves suffering, that involves evil, and without which it couldn't come to pass. Without the fall, there couldn't be the redemption, and without the evil that we have in life, in this material life, we couldn't experience the actual beauty of the design that we will eventually see face to face.

REICHARD: You write that your outlook in life has gotten darker as you've gotten older, but your serenity has increased. What do you mean?

KLAVAN: Well, that's the funny thing. When I realized, I mean, I've made my living as a crime writer. I write about crime stories, murder, know, gangsters and all these things, all these terrible things. And when I realized I was becoming a Christian, I prayed to God. I said, please, God, do not let me become a Christian novelist, you know, because I hate those novels. I hate those happy novels where everything is great and everything's for the family and all, you know. And listen, I'm not against them. I'm not philosophically against them. If you enjoy that, that's great. But it would be like, I can't sit through a romantic comedy. It would be the same thing as turning me into the writer of romantic comedies. I love tough guy fiction and that's what I write.

So I was afraid that my attitude, I'd lose my sense of realism. And instead what happened was my sense of realism grew much, much darker because now I had a sense of sin and morality and the distance we are from our souls are from God. And I saw it all around me and things got darker and darker. But at the same time, even as I was realizing that my joy was increasing, my serenity was increasing, my peace was increasing because I suddenly realized that, this is all taking place in the context of this great designer’s great design.

REICHARD: Yeah, and then on page 123, this really jumped out to me: “The barbarian intellectual, the materialist thinker of psychopath.” I'm telling you, when I lived in Chicago, I was around really intellectual people, University of Chicago kind of people, really smart people who knew about a lot of things, you know, math and literature and geography and history and science. Then I moved to the Ozarks where fewer people are college educated, but they were wiser. And so I don't have to convince a farmer that if he wants to have a herd, he needs a bull and some cows. You can't just have all bulls or all cows. So talk about that a bit.

KLAVAN: That kind of intellect that you're talking about, there are different kinds of intellect, and that kind of intellect that you're talking about that you saw in Chicago, I've seen in New York and LA and London and all these places, is supposed to be the servant of a greater heart. And I think that people who are good at that intellect have a tendency to get seduced by the intellect into thinking that it makes them better than other people. It makes them…It makes them potentially great servants of other people.

I wouldn't want an untrained doctor to operate on me. I wouldn't want an untrained scientist to do experiments. I want people who are learned to do those things. I want a novelist who knows how to use the English language and who's educated in that. But if you don't understand that these are instruments in service of love, then you don't understand anything.

And I know a lot, like you, know a lot of intellectuals who do not know anything at all. And they develop these systems and the systems don't work and they can't admit the systems don't work. It's pride. If I'm just showing off or demonstrating how brilliant I am and how wonderful it is that I can just dissect some idea, I'm failing. Anything can be taken apart. Anything can be taken apart by the intellect.

You can prove anything by the intellect. And that's why you have to start with an axiom that there is such a thing as good and evil and that you were determined to serve the good. And I think that's the difference between an Antonin Scalia who was such a brilliant justice and many people who are just as brilliant but are stupid as a brick. I think that's the difference is that sense the fact that he was a devout believer I think led him on his way.

REICHARD: Andrew Klavin, thank you so much. Really enjoyed it.

KLAVAN: It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

REICHARD: You’ve been listening to an extended interview with author and podcaster Andrew Klavan. This is the full version of the edited conversation you heard earlier this week on The World and Everything in It.

Let us know you’re listening. You can do that by dropping us a line. Email us at editor@wng.org. That’s editor@wng.org. Or you can subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. We'll talk to you Monday. Have a great weekend!

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