BIERCE: WORLD’S FUNNIEST HUMANIST
by Don Swaim
Drawing of Ambrose Bierce by David Levine used with permission.
© Matthew & Eve Levine 2012. Limited edition prints and licensing opportunities
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“Christians and camels receive their burdens kneeling,” wrote Ambrose Bierce, the prolific nineteenth and early twentieth century journalist, fiction writer, and humorist, perhaps best known for his transformative tale of psychological horror “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” It is likely that Bierce did not know the words “humanist” or “humanism.” In his day, the terms were not commonly used in the way they are now. The closest he came was in flippantly describing “humanitarian” as “a person who believes the Savior was human and himself is divine.”
But he was aware of the adjective “funny,” which he defined as, “Having the quality of exciting merriment,” and, to demonstrate, he poetically depicted the final words of a certain Dr. Bartlett:
The point of death I can certainly see,
But the point of the joke is concealed from me.
Bierce was, in today’s parlance, a libertarian and an advocate of the Victorian era’s most prolific agnostic, Robert G. Ingersoll, who proudly wore the banner of blasphemer. Bierce himself never identified as agnostic or atheist. He allowed his pen to speak for him, writing with such lacerating wordplay and outrageous wit that his work holds up more than a century after his death, in particular the sardonic definitions in his The Devil’s Dictionary, which he began compiling as an aspiring columnist in San Francisco. While Bierce never defined “agnostic” in his wordbook, he wittily described “Faith” as, “Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge of things without parallel.”
The late Bierce scholar Lawrence Berkove maintained that Bierce failed to adopt a true philosophy, that his deepest values were not rational but humanitarian, and that he appeared to have been influenced by the Hellenistic philosophy of Stoicism, which, in a nutshell, holds that virtue is the greatest good.
Bierce concocted “A Decalogue,” which he facetiously labeled as, “A series of commandments—ten in number—just enough to permit an intelligent selection for observance, but not enough to embarrass the choice.” His so-called revised edition of “A Decalogue,” he asserted, was calculated for this meridian:
Thou shalt no God but me adore:
’Twere too expensive to have more.
No images nor idols make
For Robert Ingersoll to break.
Take not God’s name in vain; select
A time when it will have effect.
Work not on Sabbath days at all,
But go to see the teams play ball.
Honor thy parents. That creates
For life insurance lower rates.
Kill not, abet not those who kill;
Thou shalt not pay thy butcher’s bill.
Kiss not thy neighbor’s wife, unless
Thine own thy neighbor doth caress.
Don’t steal; thou’lt never thus compete
Successfully in business. Cheat.
Bear not false witness—that is low—
But “hear ’tis rumored so and so.”
Covet thou naught that thou hast not
By hook or crook, or somehow, got.
G. J.
The “Decalogue” was signed by “G. J.”, identified by Bierce as “...that learned and ingenious cleric, Father Gassalasca Jape, S. J. [Society of Jesuits] ”
Although Bierce was coy as to his personal religious beliefs, ducking behind cynicism and dark humor while unloading bon mots like buckshot, he clearly conveyed where he stood, as indicated by the satirical definitions in his Devil’s Dictionary (originally titled The Cynic’s Word Book, 1906). A sampling:
BUDDHISM. A preposterous form of religious error perversely preferred by about three-fourths of the human race.
CHRISTEN. To ceremoniously afflict a helpless child with a name.
CHRISTIAN. One who believes the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor.
CHRISTMAS. A day set apart and consecrated to gluttony, drunkenness, maudlin sentiment, gift-taking, public dullness and domestic behavior.
GENUFLECTION. Leg-service. The act of bending the knee to Him who made it that the posture is unnatural and fatiguing.
HEATHEN. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something he can see or feel.
NOTE: For a complete listing of Bierce’s religious terms go to: Glossary
Such writing, along with his daily journalism in which he frequently reviled the clergy, took courage in an era when blasphemy laws remained on the books. Courage was one quality Bierce had without qualification, as evidenced by his bravery in the Civil War, during which he suffered a sniper’s near-fatal bullet wound; and as a newspaper columnist in San Francisco, boldly walking the streets with a holstered revolver because of myriad death threats. Not to mention his venturing alone as a man of seventy-one to Mexico at the height of a bloody revolution in which no prisoners were spared.
It is correct to say that none of the existing photos of Bierce show a smile on the handsome face he retained well into late age—but one does not need to grin to be amusing. Some critics and biographers have falsely portrayed him as bitter and enraged, the product of an unfortunate childhood in which he hated his mother and father while also being haunted by his brutal experiences as a young military officer in the Civil War.
The myth that he despised his parents is based on misinterpreting a series of his short stories collectively known as “The Parenticide Club” in which the parents of the various narrators meet violent ends. But an author’s true self is not necessarily defined by his fiction. The scholar Berkove cites a heartbreaking letter Bierce wrote to his mother after he learned of his father’s fatal illness: “...I beg you to tell him how deeply I feel for him, and ask him [to] forgive me for the sake of the love I have always borne him. ...Of all of us, you, my poor mother, are the only one to whom the consciousness of having always performed your every duty with unswerving patience, gentleness, and grace will come to temper the bitterness of grief.”
That hardly sounds like a man embittered by his parents and wanting to slaughter them.
Similarly, Bierce was invigorated by the war, not haunted by it, despite his head wound. Had he a choice he would have made the military his career following the conflict, but he was not awarded the commission he sought. That he ultimately chose to write instead of aspiring to wear a uniform was a godsend for American letters.
But the “Bitter Bierce” fallacy is difficult to refute.
While it is true that Bierce sustained a jaundiced view of mankind, he enjoyed a legion of loyal friends and scores of disciples. An early Bierce biographer, Vincent Starrett, quotes an unnamed friend of Bierce: “His private gentleness, refinement, tenderness, kindness, unselfishness, are my most cherished memories of him. He was deeply—I may say childishly—human... He had no vanity; his insolence toward the mob was detached, for he was an aristocrat to the bottom of him. But he would have given his coat to his bitterest enemy who happened to be cold.”
In his final years at the Olympia Apartments in Washington, D. C., Bierce, according to a visiting journalist, served Sunday morning breakfasts for “literary and brain workers” and brewed coffee in a peculiar pot shaped like a melon.
Bierce, whose life overlapped with Ingersoll’s, although the two never met, did not always agree with the great agnostic, such as on the issue of women’s suffrage (Bierce was a misogynist), but after Ingersoll’s death in 1899, Bierce rushed to defend him in an article for the San Francisco Examiner titled “The Dead Lion.” It was in response to a critic’s speculation as to whether Ingersoll, on the eve of his death, might have looked back and wondered if he could have helped to make man’s life on earth more noble, more spiritual, or truly more worth living.
With uninhibited exclamation points, Bierce pounced:
This of a man who taught all the virtues as a duty and a delight!—who stood, as no other man among his countrymen has stood, for liberty, for honor, for good will toward men, for truth as it was given to him to see it, for love!—who by personal example taught patience under falsehood and silence under vilification!—who when slandered in debate answered not back, but addressed himself to the argument!—whose entire life was an inspiration to high thought and noble deed, and whose errors, if errors they are, the world cannot afford to lose for the light and reason that are in them!
He once wrote, “The test of truth is Reason, not Faith; for to the court of Reason must be submitted even the claims of Faith.” Yet despite Bierce’s sallies at religious superstition, in 1901 in an article published in the New York Journal, he threw a rare olive branch to Christianity, suggesting there were even worse faith-dispensing iterations:
Let those [agnostics] who decry or fear the “intolerance” of modern Christianity consider whether they are not denouncing a shadow or cowering before a dream. There should be a lesson to them in the fact that it is only in Christian countries that free speech is known to all...
And where is Bierce, who mysteriously vanished in Mexico in 1914 while, for the sheer adventure of it, attempting to reach the forces of the bandit and revolutionary Pancho Villa? Did he die by Pancho’s firing squad or an asthma attack of which he was prone? Was he a suicide, about which he once said, “The smug, self-righteous modern way of looking upon the act as that of a craven or a lunatic is the creation of priests, philistines and women.”?
Is Bierce in heaven or in hell—or neither?
Such questions, involving the mystifying disappearance of one of America’s most idiosyncratic literary figures, will never be solved. The best guess is that he lies, unknown, in a forgotten grave under the bitter alkali flats of the wind-swept Mexico desert.
Although he often signed his letters “May God overlook you...” he would have scoffed at the notion of pearly gates, fluffy clouds, and angels strumming harps. Perpetual blackness may be a terminus beyond the grasp of mere mortals, but Bierce saw it this way: “Life is a little plot of light. We enter, clasp a hand or two, and go our several ways back into darkness. The mystery is infinitely pathetic and picturesque.” And with the humor a humanist would well understand, he viewed death in practical terms:
Done with the work of breathing, done
With all the world; the mad race run
Through to the end; the golden goal
Attained and found to be a hole!
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