Substitute for God?

For most of his 52 years, French Writer Andre Malraux had been searching for an answer to the question: What is the meaning of man? As a youth, he took up archeology, looking for the meaning among dead civilizations. Later he sought the answer in revolution, fought alongside the Communists in China and Spain. In 1939, he broke with the Communists, and after World War II, became right-hand man to right-wing General Charles de Gaulle. In his monumental book, The Voices of Silence, published in the U.S. last year (TIME, Nov. 23), Malraux seemed at last to have found his answer in art. Now, in a thoughtful essay in the French Catholic monthly, Etudes, Philosophy Professor Jean Onimus tells Malraux that he is wrong again.

Malraux and many like-minded intellectuals, writes Onimus, try to substitute art for God. "Malraux finds in art the justification for existence . . . He cannot dwell in nothingness; the absurdity of it catches him by the throat . . . He seized upon art when it appeared to offer an escape toward heaven . . . For Malraux, [art] succeeds the gods; it takes over from a faltering religion . . . Modern man . . . stripped of faith and hope, surrounds himself with [masterpieces], those ghosts who have successfully triumphed over time . . . For modern man, as Malraux sees him, museums are no longer collections, they are sanctuaries where, in a world given over to materialism and mechanization, the spirit survives . . ."

Malraux had written: "The alcove of Vermeer, a flower painting by Chardin, give us a view of a world where man is less antlike than in his own." But, Onimus responds: "What anguish in these few lines! And, in fact, perhaps what misgivings! Does Malraux seriously believe that Vermeer's alcove, Chardin's bouquet, however beautiful they are, contain within them the power of salvation? . . . His position is untenable."

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