Bertrand Russell

On 30 March 1940 a judge of the Supreme Court of New York County decided that one of the best-known philosophers in the world could not teach philosophy at the City College of New York. The case had been brought by a taxpayer, Jean Kay, who argued that the appointment of the Englishman Bertrand Russell "was against public policy because of the teachings of Bertrand Russell and his immoral character."¹ Justice John McGeehan agreed. He quoted passages from Russell's books on marriage and education, said that appointing him would be "in effect establishing a chair of indecency," and added that "academic freedom does not mean academic license."²³ He was careful to say one more thing: "I am completely dismissing any question of Mr. Russell's attacks upon religion."⁴

Not everyone believed him. A modern encyclopedia of philosophy says plainly that the decision was "based partly on Russell's atheism," and accounts of the case still differ on what really moved it.⁵ What is certain is that by 1940 Russell had spent almost forty years saying in public what he thought about God, and that by his own account his doubts went back to a book he read at eighteen. This chapter follows him from a pious grandmother's house in Richmond Park to that courtroom, and asks what his unbelief became.

Pembroke Lodge

He was born on 18 May 1872 at Ravenscroft, near Trellech in Monmouthshire, into the family of the statesman Lord John Russell.⁶ His parents, Viscount and Viscountess Amberley, were freethinkers. His mother and his six-year-old sister Rachel died of diphtheria within days of each other in the summer of 1874, and his father died in January 1876, at thirty-three.⁷⁸ The scholar Benjamin Jowett, writing to the boys' grandmother, said that some people grieved that the Amberleys "had not the ordinary hopes and consolations of religion," and answered them himself: "God does not regard men with reference to their opinion about Himself or about a future world, but with reference to what they really are."⁹¹⁰ Amberley had wanted his sons raised as freethinkers. Their grandparents, the modern account says, overturned his will to prevent it.¹¹

So the two boys, Frank and Bertrand, came to live at Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park, the house Queen Victoria had given for life to their grandfather, Lord John Russell. He died in 1878, and their grandmother raised them.⁸¹² Lady Russell had been brought up in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and in the second half of her life she came gradually to a Unitarian faith, "which she held with earnestness to the last."¹³ She did not hate unbelievers, but she grieved over them. Writing to her younger son in 1870, she called those who "dance on the ruins of all that has hitherto sustained their fellow-creatures" woefully wrong, and added a sentence that is both a reproach and a hope: "I believe that many of those who deem themselves sceptics or atheists retain, after all, enough of the divine element within them practically to refute their own words."¹⁴¹⁵ Russell himself said later that he "had all the benefits of a Christian education."¹⁶

Who made God?

How he left that faith he described in his most famous lecture, many years later. "I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause," he said, "until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: 'My father taught me that the question, Who made me? cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, Who made God?'"¹⁷ The sentence he quoted is not quite Mill's. What Mill actually wrote is longer: his father had taught him "that the question, 'Who made me?' cannot be answered, because we have no experience or authentic information from which to answer it; and that any answer only throws the difficulty a step further back, since the question immediately presents itself, 'Who made God?'"¹⁸¹⁹ Russell remembered the point, not the words, which is what memory usually keeps.

His own later account of how belief is made explains why he never thought the change mysterious. People believe what they are taught as children: Kant, he wrote, kept "the maxims that he had imbibed at his mother's knee," and conscience is mostly "vague reminiscences of precepts heard in early youth, so that it is never wiser than its possessor's nurse or mother."²⁰²¹ He was a boy raised on his grandmother's precepts who met, at eighteen, a better argument. In 1890 he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he met the mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, his future collaborator.²²

A free man's worship

His grandmother died in January 1898.²³ Four years later he wrote the essay that first set out his outlook in public, "A Free Man's Worship," published in December 1903.²⁴ It is not an argument against God so much as a picture of a world without one: a world, he said, "even more purposeless, more void of meaning" than the one science had already revealed. "Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built."²⁵ And yet the essay ends in something like devotion. "In this lies Man's true freedom: in determination to worship only the God created by our own love of the good, to respect only the heaven which inspires the insight of our best moments."²⁶ "To abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things — this is emancipation, and this is the free man's worship."²⁷

He kept looking for a religion that did not need a God. In 1912, in a theological quarterly, he argued that religion could survive "the decay of traditional religious beliefs,"²⁸ that "the religion which has no dogma is greater and more religious than one which rests upon the belief that in the end our ideals are fulfilled in the outer world,"²⁹ and that "the essence of religion, then, lies in subordination of the finite part of our life to the infinite part."³⁰ By 1917 he was less sure even of this. Reprinting "A Free Man's Worship," he wrote that its ethics was "not quite identical with that which I hold now: I feel less convinced than I did then of the objectivity of good and evil," though its attitude, he said, was still the one that must be taken "by those who have no dogmatic religious beliefs."³¹³² On his timeline, this is the first revision: not a return to faith, but a stripping away of the last thing that had stood in its place.

Prison and plain speech

His unbelief was already costing him. In 1910, a modern account says, he failed to win a Liberal nomination for Parliament because of his atheism.³³ In 1916 he was fined £100 and dismissed from his lectureship at Trinity for a pamphlet against the war, and in 1918 he served five months in Brixton prison, where he wrote a book on the foundations of mathematics.³⁴³⁵³⁶ Asked his religion when he arrived, he is said to have answered "agnostic," a story that comes from his own later autobiography.³⁷

After the war he said what he thought without softening it. In 1922, giving a memorial lecture on free thought, he said: "I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out."³⁸ In 1925, in a short book called What I Believe, he wrote that "God and immortality, the central dogmas of the Christian religion, find no support in science," but added a qualification he kept for the rest of his life: "I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction."³⁹⁴⁰ In their place he put a sentence that summed up his ethics: "The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge."⁴¹

Why I Am Not a Christian

In March 1927 he gave a lecture at Battersea Town Hall for the South London branch of the National Secular Society, the society Charles Bradlaugh had led half a century before.⁴² He called it "Why I Am Not a Christian," and it is his declaration. "I have to tell you two different things," he began: "first, why I do not believe in God and in immortality; and, secondly, why I do not think that Christ was the best and wisest of men, although I grant him a very high degree of moral goodness."⁴³ He went through the arguments for God and found them wanting, beginning with the First Cause and Mill's sentence. He said why most people believe: "Most people believe in God because they have been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is the main reason."⁴⁴ And he said what he thought lay underneath: "Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear."⁴⁵

He was harder on the churches than on Christ. "I think that there are a good many points upon which I agree with Christ a great deal more than the professing Christians do."⁴⁶ But "I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world."⁴⁷ And he ended with the hope that ran through all his writing: "A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past, or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men."⁴⁸

The fairest reply came from a Quaker lecturer at the Selly Oak Colleges in Birmingham, H. G. Wood, who published a book in 1928 called Why Mr Bertrand Russell Is Not a Christian. "The main reason why he is not a Christian," Wood wrote, "is that he simply does not know what religion is."⁴⁹ He admired his opponent: "Mr Russell is an intellectual Alexander the Great," and "I cannot forget the stand that he took during the War for justice and peace."⁵⁰⁵¹ The poet T. S. Eliot reviewed the lecture under the title "Why Mr Bertrand Russell is a Christian," according to Wood; Eliot's own text has not been found for this chapter.⁵²

Russell answered Wood in a second address, printed with the first. "After all, I had all the benefits of a Christian education, and he did not have the benefits of an Agnostic education; so that possibly the argument might be considered two-edged."¹⁶ He called himself "a Rationalist ever since I can remember," and stated his rule of belief: "we ought not to believe, and we ought not to try to cause others to believe, any proposition for which there is no evidence whatever." But he would not claim more than that. "We ought not to commit ourselves to dogmatic negations any more than to dogmatic affirmations."⁵³⁵⁴⁵⁵

The cost

His books on marriage and morals, which said that sexual relations "which do not involve children should be regarded as a purely private affair," were among those the judge would quote against him.⁵⁶ When the Board of Higher Education appointed him to teach philosophy at City College in 1940, protests followed, and Jean Kay's petition went to Justice McGeehan.⁵⁷ The judge quoted What I Believe and Marriage and Morals against him; when he quoted the line that "the peculiar importance attached, at present, to adultery is quite irrational," he added commas and gave a different page number, perhaps from another edition.⁵⁸ The city's lawyers would not appeal, the higher courts would not hear Russell's own motion, and the appointment was void.⁵⁹ His timeline records that as the cost. The judge said religion had nothing to do with it. Whether it did is a question the sources still answer differently.⁶⁰⁵

He was not silenced. In 1950 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought."⁶¹⁶² He spent his last decades campaigning against nuclear weapons, and served a week in prison for it at eighty-nine.⁶³ A modern encyclopedia quotes him from those years: "My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear."⁶⁴ He died at Penrhyndeudraeth in north Wales on 2 February 1970, aged ninety-seven.⁶⁵

Did his unbelief change shape?

It changed less than the man who held it. Russell left his grandmother's faith at eighteen, by his own account, over one sentence about who made God, and he never went back. What changed was what he put in its place. At thirty he offered a worship without God, built on "unyielding despair" and a love of the good. At forty he looked for a religion without dogma. By forty-five he was no longer sure that good and evil were facts about the world at all. In middle age he said plainly that religion rests on fear and that the churches had hindered moral progress, but he refused to claim that he could prove there was no God, and he would not commit himself to dogmatic negations any more than to dogmatic affirmations. His grandmother had hoped that unbelievers kept enough of the divine in them to refute their own words. Her grandson would have said that what he kept was the conviction that the good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

Charles Bradlaugh, who led the society Russell addressed at Battersea, and Lucretius, whose view of religion Russell said was his own, each have a chapter in this book.