Do you believe in God? What will happen to you at death? Do you pray?
Do you think religious believers are deluded?
Many people would hesitate to raise these questions at dinner. Antonio
Monda, on the other hand, has been posing them for several years to
cultural eminences like Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie,
Daniel Libeskind, Derek Walcott, Spike Lee, Jonathan Franzen, David
Lynch and Martin Scorsese.
When Mr. Monda interviewed Grace Paley two years before her death in
August, she wondered why he wanted to talk about religion and her
views on it. "I think it's the most important subject of our time," he
said. "Rather, the most important of all times."
She parried, "Are you serious?" Their exchange opens one of the most
moving of the 18 interviews in "Do You Believe? Conversations on God
and Religion," just published by Vintage as a paperback original.
Most of those Mr. Monda approached and his book also includes
interviews with Jane Fonda, Elie Wiesel, Paul Auster, Michael
Cunningham, Richard Ford, Nathan Englander, Paula Fox and the late
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. were similarly puzzled by his interest.
But only a few, including Hillary Rodham Clinton and Condoleezza Rice,
turned him down.
Mr. Monda, 46, moved to the United States in 1994 and teaches in the
film and television department of New York University. He is also
American cultural correspondent for the Italian newspaper La
Repubblica, where he published five of these interviews in 2003,
beginning with "maybe the most stunning name, Saul Bellow," he said in
a conversation last month. "My idea was that if you get Saul Bellow it
will be easier to go to other people and say, `Saul Bellow agreed.'"
Mr. Bellow was one of the five interviewees who answered yes to what
Mr. Monda calls the "fundamental question": whether one believes God
exists. Six answered no. Seven placed themselves somewhere in between.
These are all people smart enough to know that defining God is not a
simple matter. The in-betweens were especially apt to speak of
mystery. Some, like Mr. Franzen, used language leaning in the God
direction:
"God's not like some chief executive sitting at a control panel,
calling all the shots," he said. "At the same time, I think there's a
reality beneath what we can see with our eyes and experience with our
senses. There's ultimately something mysterious and un-materialistic
about the world. Something large and awe-inspiring and eternal and
unknowable."
Spike Lee spoke of "a superior being" and a "superior presence" "but
I don't know if I can call it God."
Others, like Mr. Rushdie and Ms. Paley, were very definite that the
"mystery" they affirmed was in no way transcendent or supernatural.
When Mr. Englander, whose prize-winning short stories reflect
rebellion against an Orthodox Jewish upbringing, was asked whether he
believed in God, he answered, "I'd be inclined to say no if I didn't
fear God's wrath."
Mr. Walcott answered, "I believe that I believe." Mr. Scorsese
appeared much more sure about his belief in Catholicism than his
belief in God. And musing on the mysteries of contemporary physics,
Mr. Cunningham said, "If you believe in physics, it's really not a big
jump to say you believe in God. Some sort of god."
Common themes run through the conversations. Fundamentalism is bad.
Atrocities have been perpetrated in the name of religion. Art itself
(writing, filmmaking) is a quasi-religious calling. Jesus was a great
"thinker" rather than redeemer. As for organized religion, no one has
a good word for it.
Some of this is predictable, occasionally even banal, though not on
that account necessarily untrue. Maybe there's comfort in the
discovery that cultural leaders entertain the same truisms about
religion as everyone else.
Mr. Monda himself defends religious institutions, although he is quick
to acknowledge their crimes, and he understands why many people fear
religion. He does not disguise his own standpoint, that of a committed
Catholic ("Apostolic, Roman," he is wont to add). "One of the things
that I tried to express in the book is that there is a strong
difference between orthodoxy and fundamentalism," he said. He sees
orthodoxy and not only in his Catholicism as perched, often
precariously, between a dangerous fundamentalism to its right and a
vague, nondemanding, "New Age cult of the personal" to its left.
"Orthodoxy is a very risky word," he admitted. "The moment you say
orthodoxy, people believe you're a fanatic."
It is hard to imagine anyone taking Mr. Monda for a fanatic. He has
the gift of pressing a point, then stepping back and letting others
have their say. These are highly distilled interviews, but the editing
reflects a scrupulous respect for those being questioned.
Respect evidently breeds respect. Mr. Monda is a filmmaker and film
critic who came of age in a strongly Marxist intellectual milieu. He
is a correspondent for an Italian newspaper with an anti-clerical
reputation. He inhabits cultural worlds that frequently exhibit an
anti-religious animus. So how is he received?
"Honestly, with great respect and also curiosity," he said. "I am
perceived as a person with strange, maybe interesting ideas."
Nothing illustrates this better than what followed after he asked Ms.
Paley, "Do you think that life after death exists?"
She replied, "Obviously no," adding, "And an 83-year-old is telling
you this, aware that she doesn't have much time to live."
And then, turning the tables on Mr. Monda, she asked, "And what is
there for you after death?"
He replied, "The true life."
"And what," she came back, "is the life that we're living at this moment?"
He answered, "A passage and a gift."
"Now, you see," she concluded, "this is an idea that interests me,
because it's very different from what I believe in."
More Articles in National »
