9 - Hemingway’s African Book of Revelations: Dawning of a “New Religion” in Under Kilimanjaro

Summary

The Gods, says Epicurus, exist in the intervals of the universe. Very well; they exist only in the void space, in the abyss which is between the world of imagination and the world of reality, between the law and its application, between the action and its results, between the present and the future. The Gods are imagined beings, beings of imagination, which therefore owe also their existence, strictly speaking, not to the present but only to the future and the past.

— Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Religion

The Gods [in African religious systems] appear as unobservable entities equivalent in many ways to the atoms, molecules and waves that feature so prominently in the explanatory statements of the sciences.

— Robert Horton, “Philosophy and African Studies”

RELIGIOUS MOTIFS CONSTITUTE a sizeable and complex body of references in Ernest Hemingway’s Under Kilimanjaro. As the quasi-fictional narrator, Hemingway gradually prepares the reader for the birth of a “new and unknown religion” (UK, 168). First cautiously and then eagerly, the reader steps into the narrator’s religious experiences as they unfold in the lee of Kilimanjaro. Although the narrator leavens his exploration of religion with jokes, he often feels it necessary to assure his wife, Mary, and ultimately the reader, that his “new religion” is “not a joke” (420). I do take this assurance seriously.

In what follows, I intend to explore these religious motifs, their origin, and their course of development to discover what their newness consists of and what may qualify them as “unknown.” I would like to state at the outset that the essential or defining factor of this “new and unknown religion” is that it founds itself on direct, unmediated, lived experiences of what phenomenology designates as the “thing-in-itself,” or what constitutes the object of our consciousness and our senses. Such experiences disclose to the narrator and eventually to the reader that the cosmos in its entirety is a sentient — that is, self-aware — series of material phenomena. In other words: all that exists, whether it exists as organic or nonorganic matter, possesses self-awareness. Such a sentient materialism suggests a sacral universe, and thus contrasts sharply with both speculative and Marxian materialisms. As we shall see, sentient materialism has deep roots in the history of science, philosophy, and religion.