Europe’s Real Deity Was Comfort

"The opening decades of the twentieth century stood in the sign of a spiritual vacuum ... Everything seemed to be flowing in a formless flood, and the spiritual restlessness of youth could nowhere find a foothold. In the absence of any reliable standards of morality, nobody could give us young people satisfactory answers to the many questions that perplexed us ... The world in which I was living – the whole of it – was wobbling because of the absence of any agreement as to what is good and evil spiritually and, therefore, socially and economically as well. I did not believe that individual man was in need of ‘salvation’: but I did believe that modern society was in need of salvation."

As was the family tradition, he learned Jewish history and religion through private tutor at home. By the age of thirteen, he could fluently speak and write Hebrew, studied the Old Testament, and the text and the commentaries of the Talmud. Although he did not disagree with the moral teachings of the Jewish religion, he developed certain antagonism against the concept of God pictured in the Old Testament. “It … occurred to me that this God was strangely preoccupied with the destinies of one particular nation, the Hebrews. The very build up of the Old Testament as a history of the descendents of Abraham tended to make God appear not as the creator and sustainer of all mankind but, rather, as a tribal deity adjusting all creation to the requirements of a ‘chosen people’: rewarding them with a conquest if they were righteous, and making them suffer at the hands of nonbelievers whenever they strayed from the prescribed path.”

So his family’s tradition of Jewish education at an early age failed the intended purpose in his case. Yet, that failure did not lead him to search for the truth in other religions. As was the case for many in the post-war Europe, religion simply lost appeal to him. “Under the influence of an agnostic environment, I drifted, like so many boys of my age, into a matter-of-fact rejection of all institutional religions … My vagueness, to be fair to myself, was not of my own making. It was the vagueness of an entire generation.”

He was soon able to read and write German, French, and Polish. After his school years, he went to University of Vienna and studied history of art and philosophy for two years. However, his mind was not set on those studies. So he aborted his studies and left Vienna in 1920 and went to Prague.

Although he was only in his early twenties, his sharp observation did not fail to notice the real condition of the post-war Europe -

Its real deity, I saw, was no longer of a spiritual kind: it was Comfort … The average European – whether democrat or communist, manual worker or intellectual – seemed to know only one positive faith: the worship of material progress, the belief that there could be no other goal in life than to make that very life continually easier or, as the expression went, ‘independent of nature’. The temples of that faith were the gigantic factories, cinemas, chemical laboratories, dance-halls, hydroelectric works; and its priests were the bankers, engineers, politicians, film starts, statisticians, captains of industry, record airmen, and commissars. Ethical frustration was evident in the all-round lack of agreement about the meaning of Good and Evil and in the submission of all social and economic issues to the rule of ‘expediency’ – that painted lady of streets, willing to give herself to anybody, at any time, whenever she is invoked … The insatiable craving after power and pleasure had, of necessity, led to the break-up Western society into hostile groups armed to the teeth and determined to destroy each other whenever and wherever their respective interests clashed. And on the cultural side, the outcome was the creation of a human type whose morality appeared to be confined to the question of practical utility alone, and whose highest criterion or right and wrong was material success.

I saw how confused and unhappy our life had become; how little there was of real communion between man and man despite all the strident, almost hysterical, insistence on ‘community’ and ‘nation’; how far we had strayed from our instincts; and how narrow, how musty our souls had become. I saw all this: but somehow it never seriously occurred to me – as it never seems to have occurred to any of the people around me – that an answer, or at least partial answers, to these perplexities might perhaps be gained from other than Europe’s own cultural experience. Europe was the beginning and the end of all our thinking.

It was through these observations and contemplations that he was passing his youthful life. “I was certainly not unhappy – only deeply disturbed, unsatisfied, not knowing what I was really after … my inability to share the diverse social, economic and political hopes of those around me – of any group among them – grew in time into a vague sense of not quite belonging to them, accompanied, vaguely again, by a desire to belong – to whom? – to be a part of something – of what?”

Then the letter came in the spring of 1922. It was his uncle Dorian writing from Jerusalem: “Why don’t you come and stay some months with me here?”

He resigned from his work at the United Telegraph newspaper the next day and was soon on his way to Near East. In Islam, however, he had no particular interest. “If anyone had told me at that time that my first acquaintance with the world of Islam would go far beyond a holiday experience and indeed become a turning point in my life, I would have laughed off at the idea as utterly preposterous”.