Tom Stoppard, who died last year, was arguably the best post-war English playwright, and definitely the most virtuosic.
Stoppard rivalled, without quite matching, Wilde’s talent for producing dazzling one-liners, while leaving Oscar far behind in structural creativity and intellectual playfulness.
He treated works of art, philosophy and science with the familiarity of an old friend, and without the reverence expected from autodidacts. With a slight chuckle, Stoppard rewrote Wilde in Travesties, Shakespeare in Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and the original authors would have chuckled with him.
Intellectually, I’d describe Stoppard as a polymath surface-skimmer. With the mastery of a Gobelin maker, he could weave into his narrative fabric themes borrowed from every academic discipline under the sun, treating them all with a light touch, wit and coruscating brilliance.
Like all virtuosos in every genre of art, Stoppard sometimes admired his own brilliance too much, as if listening to his own voice and winking at the audience: “There, clever isn’t it?”. It always is, but sometimes too much cleverness comes at the expense of too little artistic truth.
However, even Stoppard’s failures are often more entertaining than lesser men’s successes, and I hardly ever miss his plays whenever they are on in London. The other day I saw Arcadia at the Old Vic, and I deserve a round of applause for that effort.
Sitting for three hours in an uncomfortable chair with no leg room is hard for a man whose new hip is only a couple of weeks old. Perhaps partly for that reason I felt the play was too long and could lose an hour without too much trouble.
Unlike Shakespeare’s plays, which are always better than they can be produced, Stoppard’s work doesn’t read especially well. It’s on stage that his plays come into their own. They live or die by pace, the faster the better, and good directors realise that, never allowing the audience either to relax for too long or to think too deeply.
Arcadia characters deliver long light-hearted monologues at full speed and on a full university curriculum. Alas, sometimes those soliloquies do sound like university lectures.
Stoppard respected his audience, giving them credit for being familiar with such diverse subjects as Fermat’s Theorem, the chaos theory, Romantic art, 18th century landscape gardening, iterated algorithms, Newton’s laws of motion and thermodynamics, entropy, classical literature, calculus – and that’s just in the first 20 minutes.
Judging by the demographics of the audience, one has to be rather old to accumulate enough knowledge to be able to follow those densely written deliveries. The other day I estimated the average age of those overachievers at 60-plus, and it might have been a rather big plus.
The most thought-provoking lines came from a character imaginatively named Septimus Hodge, and they certainly provoked my thoughts. The two lines that especially caught my attention dealt with seemingly different fields of knowledge: art, physics and philosophy.
In one, Septimus wittily describes 19th century Romanticism as “a decline from thought to feeling”. In the other, he asks a pointed question without offering an answer: “If everything from the furthest planet to the smallest atom of our brain acts according to Newton’s laws of motion, what becomes of free will?”
This is where, with your permission, Stoppard leaves off and I pick up. For two disciplines are sorely missing from those he juggles so expertly: theology and real philosophy, a subject that Jacques Maritain aptly described as “the science of first causes”.
Romanticism indeed was exactly what Stoppard wrote it was, thought declining to feeling. However, that happened because, during the so-called Age of Reason, the thought in question was weak to begin with. Romanticism didn’t initiate the decline; it merely acknowledged it.
The very term, the Age of Reason, is fraudulent. It should have been more appropriately called ‘the Age of Reason Debauched’.
‘Reason’ to those lame Enlightenment thinkers simply meant atheism and materialism, those two great slaps in the face of real ratio. That ersatz reason was at base emotive post-rationalisation of an intuitively felt loathing for everything the ancien régime represented, especially Christianity.
The well of that post-rationalisation predictably ran dry in short order and, come the 19th century, it had nowhere else to go but towards Romanticism, with its solipsistic emotiveness and pagan nature-worship.
Septimus’s rhetorical question on the conflict between determinism and free will was appropriate and tersely put. But it’s impossible to answer coherently within the suffocating confines of materialism.
The smallest atom of our brain may or may not act according to Newton’s laws of motion, and in fact modern science goes far beyond Newton. But the atoms in our brain, whether acting on Newton’s laws or those of Einstein or Heisenberg, have nothing to do with free will. Neither do various synapses sending their neurons into scanners to make their displays light up or not.
All those marvellous physical things are reshuffled cards in a pack, but it’s human free will and the thought it produces that does the reshuffling.
Free will is a theological and philosophical concept. It originates in metaphysics, a discipline that justifies its etymology by going beyond physics.
Had metaphysics and theology figured among the disciplines Stoppard invoked, he wouldn’t have let Septimus’s question remain unanswered. He would have said that free will and the physical world, including Newton’s laws of motion, belong to two different realms of God’s creation.
Even within the metaphysical realm a conflict between predetermination and free will did puzzle thinkers for centuries. In religious thought, predetermination is expressed as predestination.
Since God, said St Augustine of Hippo (d. 430 AD), is omnipotent, he uses his power to predestine our lives in eternity. But since he is also omniscient, he allows us to make our free choices whenever they are called for: he knows in advance which way we’d go, but he doesn’t force us to choose one way or the other.
One part of Augustine’s teaching that I find less than convincing is that he believed that, though we do make choices of our own free will, they don’t affect our salvation or perdition. These are predestined by God, and that’s something I’ve always struggled with. If we don’t stand to gain from making good choices or lose from making bad ones, free will seems an exercise in futility.
Luther and especially Calvin built a vast corpus of theology on predestination, and I think they were wrong. Actually, the whole issue of predestination is rooted in the timelessness of God, as opposed to the temporal existence of man. This juxtaposition gave rise to the most elegant solution to our problem, that by the Spanish Counter-Reformation thinker Luis de Molina.
In effect, though he himself didn’t use this terminology, Molina linked the philosophical category of time with the grammatical category of tense. Our lives unfold within three basic tenses: Past, Present and Future. But God, being timeless, has only one tense: the Present Perfect.
What is ‘will be’ for us is ‘has been’ for God. Hence when he predestines each individual for salvation or damnation, God does so not arbitrarily but on the basis of the free choices he knows the individual will have made during his life – before he has actually made them within his earthly time frame.
Had Stoppard thought in such terms, he could have doubtless put some dazzlingly witty response to Septimus’s question into the mouth of another character, possibly Thomasina. However, he didn’t think in such terms, which is why his probing question fell flat.
Thus he unwittingly proved that, outside metaphysics, questions touching on first causes can never be answered, nor even properly asked. Having said that, one shouldn’t expect philosophical depths in a work of art – unless it’s Bach, but that’s a whole new topic.