Editing Rebecca West (section)

==Religion==

West's parents had her [[Baptism|baptised]] into the [[Church of England]] two months after birth<ref>London Metropolitan Archives, Bryanston Square St Mary, Register of Baptism, p89/mry2, Item 040</ref> and she considered herself a Christian, though an unconventional believer. At times, she found God to be wicked; at other times she considered him merely ineffectual and defeated.<ref>{{harvnb|Schweizer|2002|pp=72–76}}</ref> However, she revered Christ as the quintessentially good man,<ref>{{cite book |first=Rebecca |last=West |title=Black Lamb and Grey Falcon |url=https://archive.org/details/blacklambgreyfal00rebe |url-access=registration |publisher=Penguin |year=1994 |page=[https://archive.org/details/blacklambgreyfal00rebe/page/827 827] |isbn=9780140188479 }}</ref> she had great respect for the literary, pictorial, and architectural manifestations of the Christian ethos, and she considered faith a valid tool to grapple with the conundrums of life and the mysteries of the cosmos.<ref>Rebecca West, "My Religion" in ''My Religion'', edited by [[Arnold Bennett]], Appleton, 1926. pp. 21–22</ref> Although her writings are full of references to the Bible and ecclesiastical history, she was essentially anti-doctrinaire and occasionally blasphemous. In 1926 she expressed the unorthodox belief that "Christianity must be regarded not as a final revelation but as a phase of revelation."<ref>Rebecca West ''My Religion'', pp. 22–23</ref> Moreover, she rejected specific articles of belief such as the [[Virgin birth of Jesus|virgin birth]], [[Original sin]], the [[Atonement in Christianity|Atonement]], and [[Divine Providence|Providence]]. Her contribution to [[Virginia Woolf]]'s Hogarth Letters Series, ''Letter to a Grandfather'' (1933), is a declaration of "my faith, which seems to some unfaith"<ref>{{cite book |first=Rebecca |last=West |title=Letter to a Grandfather |publisher=Hogarth |year=1933 |page=43 }}</ref> disguised as [[philosophical fiction]]. Written in the midst of the Great Depression, ''Letter to a Grandfather'' traces the progressive degeneration of the notion of Providence through the ages, concluding skeptically that "the redemptive power of divine grace no longer seemed credible, nor very respectable in the arbitrary performance that was claimed for it."<ref>{{harvnb|West|1933|p=30}}</ref> As for the Atonement, ''Black Lamb and Grey Falcon'' is in part meant as a refutation of that very doctrine, which she saw as having sparked a fatal obsession with sacrifice throughout the Christian era and, specifically, as having prompted [[Neville Chamberlain]] to formulate his policy of [[appeasement]], which she vehemently opposed. She wrote:{{blockquote|All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing&nbsp;... [Augustine] developed a theory of the Atonement which was pure nonsense, yet had the power to convince&nbsp;... This monstrous theory supposes that God was angry with man for his sins and that He wanted to punish him for these, not in any way that might lead to his reformation, but simply by inflicting pain on him; and that He allowed Christ to suffer this pain instead of man and thereafter was willing on certain terms to treat man as if he had not committed these sins. This theory flouts reason at all points, for it is not possible that a just God should forgive people who are wicked because another person who was good endured agony by being nailed to a cross.<ref>{{harvnb|West|1994|pp=827–828}}</ref>}}

World War II shocked her into a more conventional belief: "I believe if people are looking for the truth, the truth of the Christian religion will come out and meet them."<ref>Rebecca West, "Can Christian faith survive this war?" interview conducted by the ''Daily Express'', 17 January 1945</ref> In the early 1950s, she thought she had a mystical revelation in France and actively tried to convert to Catholicism.<ref>{{harvnb|Glendinning|1987|p=221}}</ref> There was a precedent in her family for this action, as her sister, Letitia, had earlier converted to Catholicism, thereby causing quite a stir, but West's attempt was short-lived, and she confessed to a friend: "I could not go on with being a Catholic&nbsp;... I don't want, I can't bear to, become a [[Graham Greene]] and [[Evelyn Waugh]], and I cannot believe that I am required to pay such a price for salvation."<ref>Rebecca West, Letter dated 22 June 1952, to Margaret and Evelyn Hutchinson. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library</ref> Her writings of the 1960s and early 1970s again betray a profound mistrust towards God: "The case against religion is the responsibility of God for the sufferings of mankind, which makes it impossible to believe the good things said about Him in the Bible, and consequently to believe anything it says about Him."<ref>Rebecca West, ''Survivors in Mexico'', Yale, 2003, p. 81</ref>

Alongside her fluctuating Christianity, West was fascinated with [[Manichaeanism]].<ref>{{harvnb|Schweizer|2002|p=71}}</ref> She describes the Manichean idea that the world is a mixture of two primeval kingdoms, one of light the other of darkness, as an "extremely useful conception of life" affirming that a "fusion of light and darkness" is "the essential human character."<ref>{{harvnb|West|1994|pp=172, 186}}</ref> On the other hand, West criticised "the strictly literal mind of the founder [of Manichaeanism] and his followers" and what she perceived as the meanness of Christian heretics who adopted Manichaean ideas.<ref name=":0">{{harvnb|West|1994|p=172}}</ref> West states that "the whole of modern history could be deduced from the popularity of this heresy in Western Europe: its inner sourness, its preference for hate over love and for war over peace, its courage about dying, its cowardice about living." Regarding the suppression of Manichaean heresies by the Christian authorities West says that whilst "it is our tendency to sympathise with the hunted hare... much that we read of Western European heretics makes us suspect that here the quarry was less of a hare than a priggish skunk."<ref name=":0" /> Nonetheless, Manichean influence persists in an unpublished draft of West's own memoirs where she writes: "I had almost no possibility of holding faith of any religious kind except a belief in a wholly and finally defeated God, a hypothesis which I now accept but tried for a long time to reject, I could not face it."<ref>Rebecca West, unpublished typescript, McFarlin Special Collections, University of Tulsa</ref>

West's interest in Manichaeanism reflects her lifelong struggle with the question of how to deal with dualisms. At times she appears to favour the merging of opposites, for which [[Byzantium]] served as a model: "church and state, love and violence, life and death, were to be fused again as in Byzantium."<ref>{{harvnb|West|1994|p=579}}</ref> More dominant, however, was her tendency to view the tensions generated in the space between dualistic terms as life-sustaining and creative; hence, her aversion to homosexuality and her warning not to confuse the drive for feminist emancipation with the woman's desire to become like a man. Her insistence on the fundamental difference between men and women reveals her essentialism,<ref>Bonnie Kime Scott, ''Refiguring Modernism'' (Vol. 2), p. 161</ref> but it also bespeaks her innate Manichaean sensibility. She wanted respect and equal rights for women, but at the same time she required that women retain their specifically feminine qualities, notably an affinity with life: "Men have a disposition to violence; women have not. If one says that men are on the side of death, women on the side of life, one seems to be making an accusation against men. One is not doing that."<ref>Rebecca West, ''Woman as Artist and Thinker'', iUniverse, 2005, p. 19</ref> One reason why she does not want to make an accusation against men is that they are simply playing their assigned role in a flawed universe. Only love can alleviate destructive aspects of the sex-antagonism: "I loathe the way the two cancers of sadism and masochism eat into the sexual life of humanity, so that the one lifts the lash and the other offers blood to the blow, and both are drunken with the beastly pleasure of misery and do not proceed with love's business of building a shelter from the cruelty of the universe."<ref>{{harvnb|West|1933|p=34}}</ref> In addition to the operations of love, female emancipation is crucial to removing the moral, professional, and [[social stigma]] associated with the notion of the "weaker sex," without trying to do away altogether with the temperamental and metaphysical aspects of the gender dualism itself.{{Citation needed|date=November 2019}} Thus, the "sex war" described in West's early short story "Indissoluble Matrimony" (1914) elevates the female character, Evadne, in the end because she accepts the terms of the contest without superficially trying to "win" that war.

The task of reconciling dualisms can also be seen in West's political propensities. As [[Bernard Schweizer]] has argued: "St. Augustine and Schopenhauer emphasized the fallenness of human life, implying a quietistic stance that could be confused with conservatism, while the [[Reclus]] brothers [famous French anarchists] urged her to revolt against such pessimistic determinism. West's characteristically heroic personal and historic vision is a result of these two contending forces."<ref>{{harvnb|Schweizer|2002|p=141}}</ref> West's conviction that humanity will only fulfill its highest potentials if it adheres to the principle of process reflects the same preoccupation: "Process is her most encompassing doctrine," states Peter Wolfe. "Reconciling her dualism, it captures the best aspects of the male and female principles."<ref>Peter Wolfe, ''Rebecca West: Artist and Thinker'', Southern Illinois, 1971, p. 12</ref>