Anthony Kronman, age seventy-one, may be the world’s most fulfilled man. A professor at Yale Law School for thirty-eight years, he has a happy marriage and four children. He swims a mile every day and is an expert fisherman with rod and spear. He lives in an impeccably decorated house worthy of Architectural Digest. He has written six books, about law, legal ethics, and education, and, last year, published his seventh, an eleven-hundred-page exploration of his personal theology, called “Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan.” By integrating the ideas of many of the world’s great thinkers—Aristotle, Aquinas, Augustine, Spinoza, and others—he has found “a third way, beyond atheism and religion, to the God of the modern world.” He suspects that he might have found the meaning of life.
Kronman’s office at Yale Law School is tidy and calm. In his desk drawers, the pencils and paper clips are perfectly aligned. His bookshelves are organized into categories: metaphysics, theology, biology, history, law. A small side table holds busts of Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Freud, and the eleventh-century Persian philosopher Avicenna. Kronman’s book is similarly organized, and is manifestly the work of a lawyer-philosopher. First, he explains the Greek view of life, as it was expressed by Aristotle; then he describes the Judeo-Christian view, as espoused by Augustine and Aquinas; finally, he explores atheism. In each case, he shows why the best possible version of each world view is unsatisfying. He concludes that “born-again paganism”—a theology of his own invention, holding that God and the world are the same—is the only truly convincing way to understand our place in the universe.
It’s not easy to read “Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan.” The book weighs four pounds; after carrying it on the train for a few days, I had to give up and read it on my phone. The arguments are twisty and detailed. One introductory chapter focusses on Melanie Klein, the psychoanalyst, and her theories about gratitude. To be successful in life and love, Klein thought, we need to feel gratitude, but many people can’t accept their dependence on others, and so end up resentful instead. At first, it’s unclear what this has to do with born-again paganism; only after many pages does Kronman argue that the Abrahamic religions, especially Christianity, make it hard to be grateful enough for life. The ancient Greeks believed that the world simply existed; they never imagined a perfect creator who gave us everything from nothing. Kronman writes that, faced with such an unmatchable gift, we cannot help but have our gratitude toward God curdle into resentment. Like teen-agers, we rebel against the caretaker upon whom we depend too completely. From this rebellion flows the anxious character of modern life—technophilic, self-centered, willful, and litigious.
As a born-again pagan, Kronman doesn’t believe in a creator. When he uses the word “God” in his “Confessions,” he refers not to a deity but to “the infinite God of the world.” Writing about Kronman’s book in the Times, David Brooks worried that born-again paganism would lead to “laxness”: “It throws each person back on himself and leads to self-absorption,” he wrote. But Kronman doesn’t see his theology as inward-looking. He finds it electrifying and eye-opening to think of the world as divine, along with everything and everyone in it.
Reading Kronman’s “Confessions,” I wondered if its author would be like Mr. Casaubon, from “Middlemarch”—a pale, stooped, carrel-dwelling monomaniac who lives entirely in his mind. In fact, Kronman is fit, graceful, sociable, even ebullient. In the right light, he resembles Richard Gere. He seems altogether too cheerful to have spent nine solitary years mounting a pagan assault upon the skeptical ramparts of modernity. He is untroubled by the fact that very few people—not even his colleagues—are likely to read his book. “The questions that I’m obsessed with just don’t bother other people as much they bother me,” he said, in his office. He speaks with precision and emphasis—a lawyer making an argument. “Most people take note of the fact that we live in time; that things come and go; that we come and go; that nothing we do lasts; that accidents befall us; that shit happens. But they aren’t stopped in their tracks by the question ‘Is there anything that isn’t touched by time?’ There are only a few people who, once this question comes to them, can rarely think about anything else.”
Kronman’s philosophical quest grew out of a blissful childhood. He and his brother Michael were surfer kids in mid-century Los Angeles. “It was the best place, the best time in the world to grow up,” he told me. His father, Harry, had trained as a rabbi before rebelling and becoming a Hollywood screenwriter, penning episodes of “Gunsmoke,” “The Untouchables,” and “The Fugitive.” His mother, Rosella Townsend, was born in Youngstown, Ohio, into a family of devout, literalist Christians; she moved to Los Angeles, became an actress, and, under the name Rosella Towne, starred in dozens of Hollywood movies. (Publicity stills for 1939’s “Code of the Secret Service” show her cheek to cheek with her co-star Ronald Reagan.)
Kronman and his father spent weekends deep-sea fishing, and, miles from land, they encountered whales, porpoises, and sharks. With his mother, he “talked about the great questions of the universe.” Years earlier, a boyfriend—the legendary Disney animator Frank Thomas—had broken up with her after she confessed that she’d never heard of Freud; in response, she entered psychoanalysis and became a committed autodidact. Kronman has a vivid memory of sitting with her in their garden, which was fragrant with jasmine and gardenia. While she smoked Kents and sipped a gin-and-tonic, they discussed Camus and existentialism. “This is the truth!” she said. He was eight.
Kronman got a Ph.D. in philosophy at Yale. He was in psychoanalysis himself when he finished his dissertation, in 1972; he didn’t want to break it off, so he enrolled at Yale Law School. After teaching, briefly, at the Universities of Minnesota and Chicago, he returned to Yale, in 1978. In 1994, Kronman became the dean of Yale Law School; he held the post for a decade. He managed the faculty, gave talks at law firms and bar associations, oversaw the renovation of the law library, and, in general, lived the glamorous life of an academic executive. Kronman admits that he “really liked walking into a room and being introduced as ‘the dean of Yale Law.’ ” Still, he said, “It’s a weirdness about me, maybe, that I’m so happy and effective in the company of other people, and, on the other hand, really don’t give a shit.” Amid meetings with donors and professors, while teaching contracts and tax law, his mind kept returning to the question of what, if anything, his daily life had to do with eternity. Did anything exist outside of time, or was it all fleeting and temporary? If nothing lasted, what was the point?
Kronman sees born-again paganism as inherently democratic. It “divinizes the distinctiveness of every individual,” he writes; it asks us to acknowledge that we regard those we love as infinitely valuable, and encourages us to remember that even people we don’t know—our fellow-citizens—are regarded that way by the people who love them. He finds that his religious inclinations are best captured by the word “reverence,” which he defines as “an attunement to the infinite horizons of familiar objects.” Despite having spent, in total, forty-five years at Yale, he often stops in the middle of the street to admire buildings, statues, and vistas he has seen many times before. When he does this, he grows silent. “I think you can train yourself, through a kind of discipline, to be better prepared to be knocked back by the unexpected vastness of a common thing,” he told me.
Reverence notwithstanding, he sometimes seems to treat the campus as an extension of his house. In the reading room of Sterling Library, which resembles the transept of a cathedral, he gestured to a spot at one of the long study tables. “This is where I wrote my dissertation, forty years ago,” he said. He looked to the neighboring chair, where a tall, slim, blond young man was sitting. “Oh, I can’t believe it—it’s my son Alex!” Alex is a senior at Yale.
“I can’t escape him, I can’t escape him,” Alex muttered. He ambled over, grinning. Both were obviously delighted to see each other.
“This is absolutely not staged!” Kronman said. “We never run into each other.”
“Actually, we run into each other all the time,” Alex said, while they hugged. “In the steam room at the gym, he’ll be at the sink and I’ll come out of the sauna and surprise him.”
“He’s going to be a comedy writer,” Kronman whispered, as we descended the stairs.
That afternoon, Kronman was teaching an undergraduate class in political philosophy; today’s subject was Rousseau and the meaning of patriotism. As we walked across campus toward class, he pointed out a favorite gargoyle and stopped to admire the Law School steeple against the sky. Alex likes to tell a story about hiking with his father in Vermont. By the side of the path, they spied a milkweed. “It was cool, but it was a pretty unremarkable milkweed,” Alex recalls. “Kind of shrivelled, maybe a little brown on the edges. Nothing really that interesting to look upon. We paused for like thirty minutes to look at it and talk about it. When we left, my dad said, ‘We’ve barely scratched the surface.’ ”
Later, back in his office, I asked Kronman whether born-again paganism wasn’t just a kind of fancy atheism. His ideas about divinity seem, at times, more poetic than religious; toward the end of the book, he devotes many pages to Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens. “The ‘God’ word,” Kronman said, nodding. “If there were another word that I could use . . . People say ‘spirituality,’ but that’s such weak tea. All of us have multiple beliefs. Say you believe in God. You also believe in other things: science, or the value of literature, or democracy. If you’re a curious and reflective person, you’ll be moved to ask: How do all these beliefs fit together? You could say, ‘Well, I guess I’m an atheist, because only atheism will save my science, aesthetics, and politics.’ Or you could say, ‘It’s God first and only, and if I have to throw those other things overboard, so be it.’ ” He leaned forward, steepling his fingers. “Or it could be that, by adjusting your conception of God, you could harmonize your beliefs, so that they fit together in an intellectually coherent and respectable way.”
Kronman’s mother died in 2014, at the age of ninety-six. In the epilogue to his “Confessions,” he quotes her last words: “The world comes back.” To him, they capture the cyclical shape of life. In many religions, the soul ascends to an eternal afterlife. In Kronman’s pagan view, it’s the universe that’s eternal; when we die, we return to it. Life is a brief opportunity to look around and see where we are going. There is a sharpness to Kronman’s theories about wonder and contentment—even, sometimes, a sense of frustration. One of his conclusions, he told me, is that “life is inherently disappointing.” The problem is that we’re trapped in “the register of time”: “We’re finite beings with an infinite appetite,” he said, “and with an appetite for the infinite.” William Blake wrote that it was possible “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,” to “Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.” Kronman only half agrees. “Our encounter with eternity is brief. Death comes all too soon,” he writes.
That evening, we hopped in Kronman’s car and went home for dinner. His wife, Nancy, a quick-witted attorney turned real-estate developer, was waiting for us; soon Alex strolled in. Emma, a twenty-nine-year-old art historian in the Old Masters department at Christie’s, arrived with her sister, Hope, a twenty-six-year-old doctoral student in neuroscience; they had driven from Brooklyn. (Kronman’s oldest son, Matthew, is a professor at the Children’s Hospital in Seattle, where he specializes in infectious diseases; all four kids went to Yale.) Like a happier, real-life version of the Royal Tenenbaums, the Kronmans are vivacious and brainy, and have an enchanted, innocent way of telling stories about each other. While Kronman set about making an excellent pork-and-veal ragout, his kids needled him about his neatnik pencil drawer and devotion to the World Fishing Network. To varying degrees, they have read their dad’s “Confessions,” but they didn’t need to: for years, after writing all morning, Kronman would knock on their bedroom doors, waking them with newly minted paragraphs. (“Listen to what Nietzche thought . . .”)
Around the dinner table, the Kronmans reminisced about Block Island, to which they decamp every summer. “The stars are incredible,” Alex said. “It’s a very born-again-pagan place.” In the mornings, the family goes clamming; in the afternoons, they spear-fish; at dusk, they surf. They pick blackberries for blackberry cobbler. After dinner, they drink on the porch, contemplate the stars, and recite poems, which they begin collecting a few months in advance, through a group e-mail chain. Nancy admires their aquatic exploits from afar. “I’m the only person who’s, like, Jews don’t do this,” she said.
I asked the kids whether, in their opinion, their way of life was a manifestation of their father’s theology.
“Remember the milkweed?” Hope asked. Everyone chuckled.
“That was a very Whitman-esque moment,” Kronman said. He had been sitting quietly, content to let his family talk. “It reminds me of something out of ‘Leaves of Grass.’ ”
Silence descended; the family looked toward the ceiling. “ ‘The tree toad is a chef d’oeuvre for the highest,’ ” Emma said, after about thirty seconds. “ ‘And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven.’ ”
“Right!” Kronman said.
“Tell him about the Bundy hawk,” Nancy said.
Kronman looked embarrassed. “I had a college friend whose last name was Bundy,” he explained. “We were playing basketball in the driveway of my house in Los Angeles, and a red-tailed hawk flew over, really close. It was just an amazingly spectacular bird. And I said, ‘Jim, look at that bird!’ And he looked up and said, ‘Oh, huh.’ ” Kronman shrugged, miming indifference. “It so infuriated me that I threw the basketball against the garage door.”
“Eeeargh!” said Alex, miming the throwing of a basketball.
“We say, ‘That was a Bundy hawk moment’ whenever someone fails to appreciate something of natural wonder,” Nancy said.
“It’s a feeling of frustration at being blocked in your longing to communicate,” Kronman said. “And also of embarrassment that you may have just felt too much at the wrong time. You’re the dork who’s staring at hawks.”
“What’s life without being the dork?” Hope asked.
“God, it’s so much better to be the dork!” Emma said.
Kronman went to the kitchen to fetch dessert—a pear-and-pine-nut cake he’d baked himself. He summoned Alex, and they collaborated in whipping up a warm grappa sabayon to pour over it. In the dining room, the lights were dim. Nancy, Emma, and Hope talked over the sound of whisks. When Kronman and Alex returned, there was applause. Kronman placed the cake on the table and, smiling, served it.
