What is it, finally, that divides the believer from the atheist? The question comes to mind in observing renowned atheist Christopher Hitchens endure, in full public view, metastatic esophageal cancer. In a remarkable Vanity Fair column, then in an interview with the vapid Anderson Cooper on CNN, and once again in a videotaped interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Hitchens has movingly described his condition, his experience of chemotherapy, and many other aspects of his illness.

But the statements that have sparked the greatest discussion are the ones in which Hitchens declares that those religious believers who hope he will undergo a deathbed conversion are bound to be disappointed. Any such conversion, if it happened, would be the product of a brain consumed by cancer and a body wracked by pain. It should not be taken seriously, in other words, as a genuine expression of the beliefs and desires of the man known as Christopher Hitchens. It should instead be dismissed as the deluded ramblings of someone driven out of his right mind by suffering and disease. And the statements of a man in such a state tell us nothing worth knowing, either about him or about God.

Hitchens would be gratified to know that his comments reminded me of a writer we both revere: Holocaust-survivor Primo Levi. More specifically, Hitchens’ statements reminded me of how, during my time working for the theoconservative journal First Things, a devoutly Christian colleague reacted to a passage of Levi’s that I had admired for years as an incomparably powerful expression of stoicism, courage, and integrity.

Here is Levi, from The Drowned and the Saved:

I entered the Lager (Auschwitz) as a non-believer, and as a non-believer I was liberated and have lived to this day. Actually, the experience of the Lager with its frightful iniquity confirmed me in my nonbelief. It has prevented me, and still prevents me, from conceiving of any form of providence or transcendent justice. . . . I must nevertheless admit that I experienced (and again only once) the temptation to yield, to seek refuge in prayer. This happened in October 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death . . . naked and compressed among my naked companions with my personal index card in hand, I was waiting to file past the “commission” that with one glance would decide whether I should go immediately into the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instance I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed; one does not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? and from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a nonbeliever is capable. I rejected the temptation; I knew that otherwise were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it.

When I referred to this passage in the First Things offices, my pious colleague reacted with visible disdain, which he conveyed in the following way: In his fear and trembling before annihilation, Levi felt for the first time in his life the call of God. And how did he respond to this call? By refusing it. And why? Because it would have embarrassed him. Far from being admirable, the statement was an almost demonic expression of the deadly sin (and singularly Christian vice) of pride.