What hasn’t Michael Novak written about in the course of his long career? Whether the subject is sports in American life or the meaning of ethnicity, The Experience of Nothingness or The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Novak is illuminating and unfailingly large-spirited. Indeed, so generous is the tone of his new book that criticism seems positively ungrateful. But perhaps Novak will be as indulgent toward carping reviewers as he has been toward Christopher Hitchens and his antics.

No One Sees God is rather like that fabled four-cornered pie in Gogol’s Dead Souls: “In one corner put the cheeks and dried spine of a sturgeon, in another, some buckwheat, and some mushrooms and onions and soft roe, and, yes, some brains, and something else as well.” Novak’s book is in part a response to the so-called New Atheists. He gives Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett short shrift, but he finds Hitchens a more worthy antagonist, devoting an entire lengthy chapter to the arguments and obiter dicta laid down in Hitchens’s bestseller, God Is Not Great. Two more chapters are given over to arguments about the existence of God with Novak’s unbelieving friend and colleague Heather MacDonald, who is based at the Manhattan Institute.

In the second half of the book, Novak steps back and offers his own ruminative reflections on these matters, which have long preoccupied him, most notably in Belief and Unbelief: A Philosophy of Self-Knowledge, first published in 1965 and issued in a third edition in 1994. He concludes with a chapter proclaiming “the end of the secularist age,” heralding not a return to Christendom but rather “a prolonged, intelligent, and respectful conversation” that will reject “outmoded ways of drawing lines” pitting faith and reason against each other. In the same vein, Novak’s epilogue asks atheists and believers to treat one another with the respect he has modeled throughout the book: “Neither the atheist nor the believer sees God. Both must live in darkness. Both must try to figure out from many clues, gleaned from here and there, who they really are in this vast cosmos, in this tiny arc of the universe, on this spinning blue-green ball, possibly insignificant among the galaxies, asteroids, cold dead planets, and even deader moons.”

Hmm. We will come back to those even deader moons. By now you’ll have a sense of the book. Readers will be inclined to take a taste from this corner of the pie, a taste from that corner, and this one kitty-corner, “and something else as well.” They will find many excellent bits, such as this one:

It is also significant that no one can come to this God [that is, the God of Judaism and Christianity] except by personal freedom. Many of His first believers at times turned against Him. A few were faithful to Him freely, often at great personal cost. Every story in the Bible has as its dramatic axis an act of liberty. At one time the same human being is unfaithful to God, and at another faithful, and the suspense in the next chapter is, What will he or she choose next?

Nevertheless, No One Sees God is a very unsatisfactory enterprise. Most egregiously, in correcting against smug conceptions of faith, Novak proposes a misleading symmetry, as we saw earlier: “Neither the atheist nor the believer sees God. Both must live in darkness.” This is doubly muddled. First, it is a non sequitur. No one sees God — yes, in one sense that is true, God being spirit and utterly beyond our ken. And yet it doesn’t follow from this that we “must live in darkness,” for God makes his presence known to us in many ways (if we trust the Book of Nature, the Scriptures, and the experience of the faithful). Indeed, God became man and lived and died among us, and his Spirit — invisible, yes, though the fruit of his animating goodness is quite tangible — indwells and inspires.

In an interview in the Fall 2008 issue of The Paris Review, Marilynne Robinson is asked, “Is religion a way to feel comforted in the face of death?” And here is Robinson’s answer: “Faith always sounds like an act of will. Frankly, I don’t know what faith in God means. For me, the experience is much more a sense of God. Nothing could be more miraculous than the fact that we have a consciousness that makes the world intelligible to us and are moved by what is beautiful.”

An interesting answer — that “sense of God” is informed by Robinson’s deep immersion in the Reformed tradition — but let me add that, had the interviewer pressed such a question on, say, my grandmother (a city missionary in Illinois, then a missionary in China), she would have responded with a simple yes, not troubling to tease out the patronizing nuances of “a way to feel comforted.”

After all, we have nothing to be embarrassed about in claiming such comfort, the ultimate consolation. And this is why Novak is doubly muddled here — because, if belief has any foundation (if it isn’t merely wishful thinking, as of course it may be; perhaps death really is the end of the story), then it is terribly misleading to say of the atheist and the believer that both must live in darkness. Here Novak appears to be indulging in rhetorical flights, as he did now and then in Belief and Unbelief: “Stripped of all consolation — as he sometimes, even often is — the believer can only continue to do what he must do.” Often? How often — and how does Novak know?

It is one thing to offer such testimony as a matter of personal experience, if that is what Novak is drawing on here, and very valuable, especially insofar as it gives courage to others in the same boat. If you have ever so much as held the hand of a lifelong believer now raddled by dementia — lost, frightened, confused, seemingly bereft of blessed assurance — you have glimpsed the reality of which Novak speaks. But it’s another thing entirely to infer from such personal testimony the experience of belief and believers generally — to make the “dark night” somehow normative of belief. In these rhetorical gestures there is a certain frisson that a detached observer may find rather silly: hence those “galaxies, asteroids, cold dead planets, and even deader moons” we met above.

And yet, and yet . . . I am truly grateful for Novak’s book, not least as the father of four grown children the two eldest of whom left the faith even before they left home, and haven’t yet returned to its credos and consolations. Despite the muddle — as I see it — Novak is quite right to insist on how vast is our unknowing. This is a truth we are particularly in danger of forgetting today, as we domesticate God and prattle about him with bumptious certainty. But it is a truth that must always be held in tension with another: that, as our hymns and carols affirm, we enjoy against all reasonable expectation an intimacy with the Creator of the universe.