The best books on the search for meaning in an age of unbelief

Don Quixote, who first appears in public in 1604, imagines himself riding around the world saving damsels in distress, righting wrongs, and punishing criminals, and his imagination is so powerful that it drives his life. I believe, therefore I am! That his beliefs are delusional does not seem to matter.

The only people he actually helps are the leisured aristocracy, who stand as proxy for all who dwell in the modern world. They become fascinated by his adventures—and for the very quality in him that they lack, his capacity for life. To use the terms of Don Quixote’s leading twentieth-century disciple, the great Gatsby, his redeeming quality is an enormous capacity for dreaming.

Nick, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, is perpetually on edge and lost, within and without, until he finally encounters someone who moves. Gatsby, this shadowy Caesar, attracting rumours like a light-bulb attracts moths, is bathed in a magical aura. But reality, which is sordid, soon crushes the beautiful dreams and the dreamer himself.

Hamlet is Shakespeare's, the master humanist, key work. It stands on the post-Christian threshold of the modern world, surveying the future, asking what is left to believe in.

Hamlet’s first significant encounter is with death, in the form of the ghost of his murdered father. His most powerful love scene takes place in the graveyard reminiscing tenderly to the skull of Yorick, the Court Jester. His one ‘felicity’, as he calls it, is to die. Hamlet confronts us with the big modern question: "To be or not to be?" However, his monologue on the subject, the most famous speech in the English language, has nothing to do with the nature of being—of self, or of identity. It is a long meditation on suicide.

Hamlet’s encounter with death, which has paralysed him, has also emptied him of any saving fantasies. He illustrates Tolstoy’s later dictum that if death becomes meaningless, then so does life. Hamlet pioneers the base modern condition—unbelief without hope of a saviour.

Dostoevsky’s central character is Nicholas Stavrogin, a Russian aristocrat, around Hamlet’s age. He has the aura of the mysterious stranger, arriving from beyond, haunted, solitary, fearless, and living outside all normal social bounds and conventions. He carries direct Christ allusions, stavros meaning ‘cross’ in Greek. Everybody from his own generation is in love with him, male and female. A few years earlier, adoring disciples travelled the world with him. He taught them that if it could be mathematically proved that the truth excludes Christ, he would choose Christ.

But Stavrogin lost his faith, and thereafter plunged into a life of violence and debauchery, seducing a number of women in the town, even, it is rumoured, raping a twelve-year-old girl. Without faith, he is equally without passion. Having lost the one indispensable thing, he kills himself.

In Henry James’ masterpiece from 1901, Lambert Strether, aged 55, is a Boston Puritan who hasn’t lived. He travels to Paris on an ambassadorial mission.

From the moment of arrival in Paris he is beguiled and intrigued, but unclear what to do. He proceeds to meander through gilded French drawing rooms in which high aesthetic taste of both manner and décor presides. This quiet and modest outsider eventually fills out into the man who runs the show.

Strether has discovered what to know, who to choose, and when to move. Everything depends on it. The method must be learnt in the thick of lived life along the way.

Here is evidence of the existence of a god within, a wisdom of soul with a coherent vision of what matters, one that slyly directs the focus of the person walking confusedly in the world, leading them to move with discrimination.

Nietzsche was the master diagnostician of the challenge of living in a secular world, once God was dead. The Birth of Tragedy develops a powerful theory of culture, its necessity for human wellbeing, and how it works.

The basic assumption is that human life is lived on the surface, driven by a substratum of demonic instincts, nightmare fears, and a barbaric will to lust and sadism. Culture’s task is to transform these unconscious drives into harmonious and beautiful images that capture the mind and give an orderly direction to how humans conduct their lives.

But for culture to have that commanding power it needs to be founded on a fixed and primordial sacred site. Without that, the modern problems rise: nihilism, rancour, and depression.