By DONALD DeMARCO
Whittaker Chambers, wrote Henry Regnery, who had known many great men during his long career as a publisher, was “one of the great men of our time.” Chambers viewed himself in humbler terms as a man “tarnished by life” and yet “an involuntary witness to God’s grace and to the fortifying power of faith.”
It was a life, nonetheless, that, for Regnery, “put all of us immeasurably in his debt.” It was Chambers’ unswerving conviction that “the crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God.” He described the vision of Communism as “the vision of Man without God.” And what he learned from Godless Communism allowed him to conclude that “Man without mysticism is a monster.”
William F. Buckley regarded Chambers as “the most important American defector from Communism.” It was because of Chambers’ intimate involvement with Communism that he was able to expose Alger Hiss, former assistant to the secretary of state and the golden boy of the liberal establishment, as a Soviet spy. From a historical perspective, this is how Whittaker Chambers will best be remembered.
The greatness of Chambers, however, if that term can be appropriated, was linked to something far less historical. It was his reverence for life, a virtue that he was slow to attain. The foreword to his best-selling autobiography, Witness, is written in the form of a letter to his two children, urging them to appreciate “the wonder of life and the wonder of the universe” with “that reverence and awe that has died out of the modern world and been replaced by man’s monkeylike amazement at the cleverness of his own inventive brain.”
The notion of “reverence for life” in the popular mind is best associated with Albert Schweitzer for whom: “Ethics is nothing other than Reverence for Life. Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting, and enhancing life, and to destroy, to harm, or to hinder life is evil.”
For Dietrich and Alice von Hildebrand, “Reverence is the mother of all virtues.”
Reverence is the realization that the wonders of life are not of one’s own making; they ultimately reveal the Hand of God.
For the active Communist, however, there was neither time nor place for reverence for life. There was work to be done; the world had to be changed, as Karl Marx had insisted. It was expected, then, that high-level Communists would not have children. Unintentional pregnancies would be routinely aborted. As Chambers tersely states the matter, “There were Communist doctors who rendered the service for a small fee.”
Yet the desire for life burned, however unconsciously, in the soul of Whittaker Chambers. That same desire burned more consciously and intensely in his wife, Esther.
She had conceived and her pregnancy was confirmed. Initially, they both agreed to have an abortion. But the realization that she was carrying a little human being gave her pause.
“Dear heart,” she said to her husband, holding his hands and bursting into tears, “we couldn’t do that awful thing to a little baby, not to a little baby, dear heart.” On hearing these pleading words, “the Communist Party and its theories, the wars and revolutions of the 20th century, crumbled at the touch of a child.”
As he confessed in his autobiography, “If the points on the long course of my break with Communism could be retraced that is probably one of them — not at the level of the conscious mind, but at the level of unconscious life.”
Life has the innate power to obliterate abstractions. And Communism was built on abstraction and was ripe to fall apart like a house of cards.
They had the child they yearned for who, “even before her birth, had begun, invisibly, to lead us out of that darkness, which we could not even realize, toward that light, which we could not even see.” They named the child Ellen and she continued to lead her parents closer toward that light.
Ellen became “the most miraculous thing that had ever happened in my life,” as Chambers proudly asserted. One day, while his daughter was sitting in her high chair and smearing porridge over her face, his eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear.
In that meditative moment the thought passed through his mind: “No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design.” Those “intricate, perfect ears,” that were the result of design, also implied a Designer, more commonly known as God.
“At that moment,” Chambers writes, “the finger of God was first laid upon my forehead.”
It was a moment of contact with God, a moment that transcends a world of suffering. He had once tried to explain to his son John that Beethoven, in his Ninth Symphony, “reached for the hand of God, as God reaches for the hand of Adam in Michelangelo’s vision of the Creation.” He severed himself from Communism, “Slowly, reluctantly, in agony,” and finally wed himself to Christianity. He became a Quaker.
Chambers worked at Time magazine from 1939-1948 where he held various writing and editorial positions. He was a senior editor at National Review from 1957-1959. President Ronald Reagan, a longtime admirer of Chambers’ writing, awarded him the Medal of Freedom posthumously in 1984 for his contribution to “the century’s epic struggle between freedom and totalitarianism.”
Whittaker Chambers, born Jay Vivian Chambers, died of a heart attack on July 9, 1961 on his 300 acre farm in Westminster, Md., at the age of 60.
His autobiography, Witness, apart from its sociopolitical significance, is a poetic, philosophical, and personal defense of reverence for life. It is also a moving account of how a child in the womb can exert the power to move hearts and change minds. It also reminds us, in his words, that, “a nation’s life is about as long as its reverential memory.”
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