The Communist authorities never knew just what to do with Vaclav Havel. And it has come to pass that Western intellectuals don't know just what to do with him, either. That's because, as the poetry of action transmuted into the prose of reflection, his inner life turned out to be as unlikely as his outer life. This hero of sorts is also a fellow intellectual. Very good. An intellectual who became a practicing politician. Even better. Just the sort of person whose utterances should regularly appear in the pages of the New York Review of Books. He became the president of a whole country. Best of all. So much reflected glory for intellectuals to bask in.

And so refreshing in his politics. "Antipolitical politics," Havel calls his position, and we understand. He rebels against the all-too-familiar line-your-pockets, business-as-usual politics that we'd rebel against, too, were we ever to have his prominence. See his integrity in adapting for the nineties the countercultural vision he and we—some of us—came to in the sixties. No wonder thousands of America's young flock to Prague to find authenticity in public life and pubs. And such style. Still wearing jeans and sweaters when he can. Cool and charming, well-read and well-spoken. He is his own man.

And yet. Aren't some of his comments just a tad strange? This cosmopolitan can sound almost as bothered by "godless communism" as the squares and rednecks of the fifties. The communism part we can understand, since, as it was actually practiced, proved to be a failed experiment, however noble in theory, and also it sent him to prison. But the "godless" part? Why that accusatory fixation with atheism? Despite his rearing in Roman Catholicism, he's not a churchgoer, thank God, not churchy at all. But he can seldom get through a speech without bringing in The Transcendent—yes, his usage brings capital letters to mind. Well, let Havel be Havel, and pull the veil over the quirks that any self-actualizing figure is bound to have. He's our man, after all.

Politicizing intellectuals will do what they must. One thing they won't do is justice to Havel. He says he never took "a systematic interest in politics" nor "identified with a particular political or economic doctrine, theory, or ideology." He minimizes his most warmly received term, "antipolitical politics," as an occasional term for a given context, to which he "never felt compelled to return." For instance, in his celebrated "Dear Dr. Husak" letter, his peculiar kind of dissent blames the leader not for the abandonment of elections or the centralization of the economy but for "the gradual erosion of all moral standards, the breakdown of all criteria of decency, and the widespread destruction of confidence in the meaning of values such as truth, adherence to principles, sincerity, altruism, dignity and honor." He faults the government not because it is communist but "because it is bad." This is a fundamentally moral vision, and looking at it through the prism of politics distorts it. No wonder Havel once remarked, "I seldom encounter genuine understanding."

To say that Havel is a moral, not a political, thinker is to start to get him right. But from what wellspring does he draw his moral vision? Here the news could not be worse for his secular admirers, for exactly what makes them uneasy lies deepest in his world-view. Havel talks a lot about God, and he means for us to take that talk seriously. His essays reveal a distinctly spiritual cast of mind; they locate the source of morality in the spiritual experience of mankind. Moreover, Havel finds religious formulations particularly congenial. Though conversant in the going ideas circulating around him, he thinks against their grain. For wisdom he reverts, unfashionably, to traditional categories of Western thought, and the older he gets, the further back he looks. Although this is not to say that religious believers will at all points be delighted with his outlook, he is unsparingly critical of atheism and routinely sympathetic toward religionists. This is the Havel we scarcely know. It is also the Havel that matters most. As in the outer drama of his sensational life, so in the inner drama of his life of the mind, Havel is indeed his own man.

Havel's central moral theme is the "notion of human responsibility." This is the shorthand answer in his essays to "the crisis of human identity" posed in his plays. This duty ethic became, for Havel, "that fundamental point from which all identity grows and by which it stands or falls." Thus, he declares,

"I am responsible for the state of the world," and he means a "responsibility not only to the world, but also 'for the world,' as though I myself were to be judged for how the world turns out." He cites the Dostoevskyan dictum that all are responsible for all. And, as with Dostoevsky, Havel sees this ethic as inherently spiritual and only derivatively social. The first responsibility is "a 'higher' responsibility, which grows out of a conscious or subconscious certainty that our death ends nothing, because everything is forever being recorded and evaluated somewhere else, somewhere 'above us,' in … an integral aspect of the secret order of the cosmos, of nature, and of life, which believers call God and to whose judgment everything is liable."

If Havel's bedrock commitment that all human meaning has a transcendent source sounds familiar to religious believers, so does his practice of searching his soul for meaning in his own life. Prison gave him ample time for this spiritual exercise, as his Letters to Olga attest, and interviewer Karel Hv'zdala wormed out of this reticent man additional revelations of his personal beliefs. About his need to feel personally related to some transcendent Being, Havel is clear. Sometimes he calls this Being God, but more often his preferred locutions are "the mystery of Being," "the memory of Being," "the absolute horizon of Being." Are these simply synonyms for God, as when Solzhenitsyn at Harvard deployed the rhetorical stratagem of calling his Christian God the "Supreme Complete Entity" for the sake of his secular audience? Or do Havel's terms signal something different? Is Havel a Christian?

This is a fair question, and Havel does not dodge it. He admits to "an affinity for Christian sentiment" and says he tries "to live in the spirit of Christian morality." But when Hv'zdala queried him about a rumor that he had converted to Catholicism, Havel began ambivalently—"It depends on how we understand conversion"—then said no. No, because he doesn't go to church regularly, hasn't been to confession since childhood, doesn't pray, doesn't cross himself when in church. No, because while sitting through secret masses in prison, he punctiliously did not take Communion. No, because "genuine conversion, as I understand it, would mean replacing an uncertain 'something' with a completely unambiguous personal God, and fully, inwardly, to accept Christ as the Son of God, along with everything that that entails, including the liturgy. And I have not taken that step." Peering at "that supremely important 'last drop,' " Havel cannot bring himself to swallow. Yes only this far: "I consider myself a believer only in the sense … that all of this—life and the universe—is not just 'in and of itself.' I believe that nothing disappears forever."

Why not just call this transcendent source of meaning God and be done with it? Because, Havel writes to his wife, he has never been sure if what he has felt since his youth "is an 'experience of God' or not." His relationship with "this 'intimate-universal' partner of mine" is not only "quite vivid, intimate and particular" but also "perhaps … more lively than for someone whose 'normal' God is provided with all the appropriate attributes." Despite repeated personal references for the transcendent Being, Havel resists the notion that this "god" of his "might demand to be worshiped or might even judge me according to the degree to which I worship him." All of which leads him to shrug, "my relationship with him is so difficult to pin down."

Still, the personal references are as persistent as the impersonal appellations, and small events can set off deep musings. For example, will he pay for a short tram ride when no one is there to see if he drops a coin in the box? There are various inducements not to pay. But there is also "a dialogue between my 'I' … and something that is outside this 'I.' "

So he ponders:

Who, then, is in fact conversing with me? … Someone who "knows everything" (and is therefore omniscient), is everywhere (and therefore omnipresent) and remembers everything; someone who, though infinitely understanding, is entirely incorruptible; who is, for me, the highest and utterly unequivocal authority in all moral questions and who is thus Law itself; someone eternal, who through himself makes me eternal as well. … At the same time, this "someone" addresses me directly and personally.

How much clearer could it be that this is God? Can't we almost see Havel (in an image borrowed from a friend of mine) standing just outside the church door for one last cigarette before going in?

Yet at once Havel backs away. "But who is it? God? There are many subtle reasons why I'm reluctant to use that word." Beyond "a certain sense of shame," he fears being too specific about "projecting an experience that is entirely personal and vague … onto that problem-fraught screen called 'objective reality.'"

Is this laudable fastidiousness or excessive finickiness? When he continues, "Whether God exists or not—as Christians understand it—I do not and cannot know," is he not willfully resisting the logical end of his line of meditation? When he asserts that Being "is, after all, easier to posit than the being of God," one can reply that few through the ages have thought so.

During his first detention, Havel submitted a request to be released, which later left him feeling discredited and ashamed. And thinking about God:

I have my failure to thank for the fact that for the first time in my life I stood—if I may be allowed such a comparison—directly in the study of the Lord God himself: never before had I looked into his face or heard his reproachful voice from such proximity, never had I stood before him in such profound embarrassment, so humiliated and confused, never before had I been so deeply ashamed or felt so powerfully how unseemly anything I could say in my own defense would be.

And then he decides yet again to call this "personal face" that he has just seen up close not God but Being!

It may be that even Havel gets a bit exasperated by his terminological inventions, for he subsequently asks, "But what is it, this rather cryptic 'Being?' I've been using the term for too long now not to feel that the time has come to throw a little light on it." Yet he immediately distracts himself: "I'm not entirely happy doing so: its blurred, 'soft' and unclear quality suits me, for it corresponds precisely to the mysterious haziness of what I am indicating by the term."

Only when reflecting on the Ultimate does this lover of clarity and order prefer imprecision to precision. If he tries to make this preference understandable, it is nonetheless odd; it's an aberration from his normal mode of thinking. So yet again he retreats into vagueness: "There is here an undeniable intimation not only that 'there is something behind it all,' but also that somewhere in the fathomless depths (i.e., fathomless to me) of everything that exists there is something beyond which there are no more 'beyonds' and beyond which there is, therefore, nothing to be, because in it is the 'last of everything.' " If this seems not enough clarification for us, the question is if it is enough for God! How does he like being called the absolute horizon and all that?

Simone Weil once wrote, "The love of those things that are outside visible Christianity keeps me outside the Church"; maybe Havel felt the same pull. Yet she remains haunted by God and thinks of him as seeking us. If Havel ever feels the breath of the Hound of Heaven on his back, he never turns around. Weil hungers for God; Havel hungers for the abstract category of transcendence.

There is one major mitigating factor in Havel's favor. Living under an ideological regime, he knew firsthand what Eric Hoffer has memorably described as the "true believer" mentality. So he developed a healthy—and maybe eventually an unhealthy—fear of fanaticism. Faith and fanaticism grow in the same field, and "the more fanatical a person is, the easier it is for him to transfer his 'faith' to another object: Maoism can be exchanged overnight for Jehovahism or vice versa, while the intensity of the dedication remains unaltered."

One who agrees with Dostoevsky that without God everything is permitted can declare that "if parents believe in God, their children will not have to go to school wearing gas masks, and their eyes will be free of pus." Yet he can also see how easily a religionist "replaces the love of God with the love of his own religion; the love of truth, freedom and justice with the love of an ideology, doctrine or sect that promises to guarantee them once and for all; love of people with love of a project claiming that it—and it alone, of course—can genuinely serve them." It is not faith as such, but defining the object for one's faith, that pulls Havel up short. How can we know enough about it to be sure? Such a person can argue perpetually on God's side, yet always shrink back from God's embrace.

Knowing how close Havel comes to accepting God as Christians accept God provides the key to understanding his essays as a whole. Whether reflecting on the twentieth century, the dominant concern of his prepresidential essays, or anticipating the twenty-first, the dominant concern of his presidential addresses, he primarily attends to spiritual issues. Moreover, he is freer about calling God God when talking about the culture than when talking about his own soul. Indeed, it is not a stretch to say that, for the main lines and great bulk of his cultural criticism, Havel might as well be a Christian.

Consider his view of our age. Havel identifies as the chief failing of "modern man, to the extent that he is not a believer," his refusal to "understand responsibility as a relationship to God." This great refusal he considers the leading characteristic of the twentieth century as a distinctive epoch. "We are going through a great departure from God which has no parallel in history.

As far as I know, we are living in the middle of the first atheistic civilization." The great refusal also carries manifold ramifications. Along "with the loss of God," Havel asserts, "man has lost a kind of absolute and universal system of coordinates. … And when this happened, man began to lose his inner identity, that is, his identity with himself."

Havel sees the hegemony of atheism as the historical outworking of our inheritance from the Enlightenment. Whatever others criticize the Enlightenment for these days, Havel scores it for what he sees as central to it: "anthropocentrism." Modern humanity "kills God, and takes his place on the vacant throne." In this transfer of authority, the "culminating belief" is that the world "is a wholly knowable system governed by a finite number of universal laws that man can grasp and rationally direct for his own benefit." And it invests science with supremacy as the way of knowing. The "fault" here "is not one of science as such but of the arrogance of man in the age of science." But now, Havel counsels, we must "abandon the arrogant belief that the world is merely a puzzle to be solved, a machine with instructions for use waiting to be discovered." We must now learn anew that "man simply is not God, and playing God has cruel consequences."

Fortunately, we now have "a signal that the era of arrogant, absolutist reason is drawing to a close." The signal is the end of communism. "Communism was the perverse extreme of this trend" of "arrogant anthropocentrism," and its passing is "first and foremost, a message to the human race," which "we have not yet fully deciphered." This world-historical passage, has, "in its deepest sense … brought a major era in human history to a close." Just here is where West could learn from East, the lands in which communist rule inflicted modernity's severest depredations. Yet, lamentably, the West shows "unwillingness to hear the warning voices coming from our part of the world."

Havel's understanding of our current historical moment, as we stand poised between two centuries (and millennia), is that "something is on the way out and something else is being painfully born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself, while something else, still indistinct, were arising from the rubble." Postmodernists see the collapse of an old order, and they revel in the resulting multifariousness. Havel does not; he looks for a new paradigm that will satisfy his lifelong passion for order.

How to find some new order for a post-Cold War world that seems to be both shrinking and yet increasingly split apart is the leading motif in the 35 addresses of the globe-trotting president gathered in The Art of the Impossible. This search takes Havel beneath the social surface to the religious roots of the world's varied cultures. The terms he uses suggest he may have read Samuel Huntington on the clash of civilizations. The emerging world must be multipolar and single at the same time. The mutipolarity is of long standing, as "for thousands of years different cultures … have lived parallel lives on our planet." But on what foundation might we build "the framework of a single global civilization"? Havel's general answer is "a global revolution" not of political or economic arrangements but "in the sphere of human consciousness." Call this collection a spiritual self-help book for the twenty-first-century world.

The West, preeminent in power, seems ill-equipped to meet spiritual needs. During the dark night of communism, Havel was inspired by "the traditional values of Western civilization." But now, he grieves, "the Western way of affirming Western values … seems to me to have seriously cooled off." The "spiritual dimension" of democracy that America's Founding Fathers promoted has become the "forgotten dimension," and what remains are "merely technical instruments" of electoral procedures. The West has imposed "informational and economic globalization," but its "essentially atheistic technological civilization" provides only "the veneer of world civilization." The West's leading exports are its unsavory "by-products," namely, "moral relativism, materialism, the denial of any kind of spirituality, a proud disdain for everything suprapersonal, a profound crisis of authority and the resulting general decay of order, a frenzied consumerism, a lack of solidarity, a selfish cult of material success, the absence of faith in a higher order of things or simply in eternity."

We will have to look elsewhere for some "genuine common ground," some "shared minimum that could serve as a framework for the tolerant coexistence of different cultures within a single civilization." Although Havel asserts that "no unbiased person will have any trouble knowing where to look," his answer is surprising. He looks to ancient religions for "the genuine spiritual roots." Secularists see them as the source of history's ceaseless wars and the least likely source of tolerance imaginable. Yet Havel insists, "If we examine the oldest moral canons, the commandments that prescribe proper human conduct and the rules of human co-existence, we find numerous essential similarities among them. If is often surprising to discover that virtually identical moral norms appear in different places and at different times, largely independently of one another."

Despite our superior information about the universe, our ancestors "knew something more essential about it than we do, something that escapes us." What they knew, for all their disparateness on details, was "the same basic message: people should revere God as a phenomenon that transcends them; they should revere one another; and they should not harm their fellow humans." (The Bible says so, too.) Havel does not recommend some syncretistic "global religion" of lowest common denominator, which is the best that secularists could imagine coming from religion. He commends, instead, an "archetypal spirituality" that he imagines "even an unreligious person—without knowing exactly why—may consider proper and meaningful." Something pre-Tower of Babel, we might say.

The irony is obvious. The cultural pacesetters urge less religion; their putative hero urges more. They wish that religion, since it can't be stamped out, would be removed from public life and limited to private indulgence; Havel rejects any move that would make the Creator "disappear from the world" and "into a sphere of privacy of sorts, if not into a sphere of private fancy—that is, into a place where public obligations no longer apply." In sum, Havel would have us resuscitate those very values and ideals that intellectuals have taken to dismissing as archaic, authoritarian, hierarchical, and oppressive.

Havel can be faulted for wanting religion's fruits more than religion itself and for underestimating the rebellious heart's hatred of God. Yet what he is articulating is exactly what C. S. Lewis catalogued in the appendix to The Abolition of Man. Lewis's term of convenience for Havel's "common minimum" was the Tao, for which his synonyms were "the Natural Law" and "the Way." Lewis explains that he is not here concerned with the question of a supernatural origin for the Tao and is not trying to smuggle in "any indirect argument for Theism." He is concerned only with "the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are."

And Havel, like Lewis, is as clear about the minimalism of his "common minimum" as about its commonness. His effort to "articulate anew humanity's essential, fundamental spiritual experience" has as its practical end establishing a tolerance that is not ersatz. We all must be able to "live and work together in peace without forcing anyone to give up his cultural autonomy." This is multiculturalism with a distinctly spiritual spin, and Havel recommends it not as a final cure-all but as a healthy first step.

Havel's attitude toward the modern world sometimes brings Albert Camus to mind. Living on this side of Nietzsche and Kafka, both Camus and Havel resisted the logic of nihilism and its counsels of despair, and proclaimed instead responsibility. Both sought to retain something of the traditional sense of what it means to be a human being. Both made approaches in the direction of Christianity—Camus's The Fall, for example, being an "almost Christian" novel—though Havel's approach brings him much closer.

But beyond any direct appropriations of their thinking that Christian scholars and critics might make, these two serve as models. They were men of integrity with restless and searching minds. They were much involved in the culture of their day and yet always standing somewhat apart. They had the independence of mind and fortitude of spirit to think against the grain. In the result, both were apostles of hope.

Hope is for Havel—as, for that matter, for Solzhenitsyn—the proper concluding note. "Hope," he avers, "is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out." For too long, he thinks, we have waited for a Godot "who embodies universal salvation." But "waiting for Godot means waiting for lilies we have never planted to grow." All his life, Havel has sought to speak "the truth simply because it was the right thing to do, without speculating whether it would lead somewhere tomorrow, or the day after, or ever." He has incarnated his theme of responsibility, and his kind of hopeful waiting—"until good seeds sprout"—is a model to be emulated by others willing to engage the world. Can we act and wait in truth and hope? Is it true that "only the infinite and the eternal, recognized or surmised, can explain the … mysterious phenomenon of hope"? Vaclav Havel says it is so.

Edward E. Ericson, Jr. is professor of English at Calvin College.

Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.