Modern Age - Winter 2017 - 127

REVIEWS

path-one that had been "sublimated by their identification
with the Left."
The author insists that real moral-political conviction "should
be hard-earned. It should bear the evidence of confrontation
with the abyss, of an awareness that the grounds of our beliefs
are more contingent than we could possibly ever account for."
There's undoubtedly too much nihilism in this formulation,
too much denigration of providence, and too much denial of
the ability of human reason ultimately to grasp the permanent
things. But these are quibbles. On the whole, Oppenheimer's fairmindedness shines through, and his gentle touch with each of
his subjects allows the reader to draw his own conclusions about
the ultimate grounds-the first and final causes-of their beliefs.
Few can doubt the moral earnestness of Whittaker Chambers.
The writer, editor, and spy would renounce communism and testify against his former comrade-in-arms and traitor Alger Hiss-
a change documented in the dense, haunting, unforgettable
prose of his eight-hundred-page memoir, Witness. Most significantly, Chambers would influence the thinking of generations of
important Americans on the nature of the communist menace.
Before his turn to the right, he was a tightly wound spring, always
impressed by the "seriousness" and "superhuman sacrifice" he
saw in his intellectual friends and fellow travelers. He sought
a "faith and vision" that gave men a reason to live and die, in a
world that was itself dying. It was a faith and vision provided by
the Communist Party. In managing a communist cell of government workers in Roosevelt's Washington of the 1930s, he gave
himself over to a cause, and found a reason to go on.
It was a series of epiphanies, rather than a single event, that
led him to leave the Party. One was his recognition of the "spark
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Modern Age - Winter 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Winter 2017

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