Religion for Atheists Read online

  We have implicitly charged our higher-education system with a dual and possibly contradictory mission: to teach us how to make a living and to teach us how to live. And we have left the second of these two aims recklessly vague and unattended.

  3.

  Who cares? Why should we be worrying about the shortcomings of university education in a book ostensibly concerned with religion?

  The reasons start to become clear when we consider the relationship between the decline in the teaching of scripture and the rise in the teaching of culture. When religious belief began to fracture in Europe in the early nineteenth century, anguished questions were raised about how, in the absence of a Christian framework, people would manage to find meaning, understand themselves, behave in a moral fashion, forgive their fellow humans and confront their own mortality. And in answer, it was proposed by an influential faction that cultural works might henceforth be consulted in place of the biblical texts. Culture could replace scripture.

  The hope was that culture might be no less effective than religion (which was understood to mean Christianity) in its ability to guide, humanize and console. Histories, paintings, philosophical ideas and fictional narratives could all be mined to yield lessons not far removed in their ethical tenor and emotional impact from those taught by the Bible. One would be able to have meaning unburdened by superstition. The maxims of Marcus Aurelius, the poetry of Boccaccio, the operas of Wagner and the paintings of Turner could be secular society’s new sacraments.

  How to live was not on the curriculum. Graduation ceremony, Oxford University. (illustration credit 4.3)

  On the basis of such notions, whole subject areas which had never before been included in formal education began to enter the curricula of universities in Europe and the United States. Literature, previously dismissed as being worthy of study only by adolescent girls and convalescents, was recognized as a serious subject fit for analysis within Western universities during the second half of the nineteenth century. The newfound prestige of novels and poems was based on the realization that these forms, much like the Gospels, could deliver complex moral messages embedded within emotionally charged narratives, and thereby prompt affective identification and self-examination. In his inaugural lecture at Oxford University in 1922, George Gordon, Merton Professor of Literature, emphasized the scale of the task that had fallen to his field: ‘England is sick, and … English literature must save it. The Churches (as I understand) having failed, and social remedies being slow, English literature now has a triple function: still, I suppose, to delight and instruct us, but also, and above all, to save our souls and heal the State.’

  4.

  Claims that culture could stand in for scripture — that Middlemarch could take up the responsibilities previously handled by the Psalms, or the essays of Schopenhauer satisfy needs once catered for by St Augustine’s City of God — still have a way of sounding eccentric or insane in their combination of impiety and ambition.

  Nevertheless, perhaps the proposition is not so much absurd as it is unfamiliar. The very qualities that the religious locate in their holy texts can often just as well be discovered in works of culture. Novels and historical narratives can adeptly impart moral instruction and edification. Great paintings do make suggestions about our requirements for happiness. Philosophy can usefully address our anxieties and offer consolations. Literature can change our lives. Equivalents to the ethical lessons of religion do lie scattered across the cultural canon.

  Why, then, does the notion of replacing religion with culture, of living according to the lessons of literature and art as believers will according to the lessons of faith, continue to sound so peculiar to us? Why are atheists not able to draw on culture with the same spontaneity and rigour which the religious apply to their holy texts?

  This acknowledgement of our inhibitions brings us back to the influence of that foremost upholder and propagator of culture in the modern world, the university. The methodologies which universities today employ in disseminating culture are fundamentally at odds with the intense, neo-religious ambitions once harboured by lapsed or sceptical Christians such as Arnold and Mill. While universities have achieved unparalleled expertise in imparting factual information about culture, they remain wholly uninterested in training students to use it as a repertoire of wisdom — this latter term referring to a kind of knowledge concerned with things which are not only true but also inwardly beneficial, a knowledge which can prove of solace to us when confronted by the infinite challenges of existence, from a tyrannical employer to a fatal lesion on our liver.

  A student of medieval literature, Oxford University. (illustration credit 4.4)

  We are by no means lacking in material which we might call into service to replace the holy texts; we are simply treating that material in the wrong way. We are unwilling to consider secular culture religiously enough, in other words, as a source of guidance. So opposed have many atheists been to the content of religious belief that they have omitted to appreciate its inspiring and still valid overall object: to provide us with well-structured advice on how to lead our lives.

  5.

  The differences between secular and religious approaches to education boil down to the question of what learning should be for.

  It is a question which tends to vex those in charge of teaching culture in secular institutions. Enquiries as to why, exactly, people should bother to study history or literature usually strike them as impertinent and argumentative and are often left unanswered. Academics in the humanities appreciate that their opposite numbers in the technical and scientific departments can without trouble justify their work in utilitarian terms to impatient government officials and donors (in the unlikely event that anyone should idly wonder what the purpose of rocket science or public health might be). But fearing that they cannot compete effectively against these rivals, the denizens of the humanities prefer to take refuge in ambiguity and silence, having carefully calculated that they retain just enough prestige to get away with leaving the reasons for their existence somewhat murky.

  When confronted by those who demand of culture that it should be relevant and useful, that it should offer up advice on how to choose a career or survive the end of a marriage, how to contain sexual impulses or cope with the news of a medical death sentence, the guardians of culture become disdainful. Their ideal audiences are students who are uninclined to drama and self-involvement, who are mature, independent, temperamentally able to live with questions rather than answers and ready to put aside their own needs for the sake of years of disinterested study of agricultural yields in eighteenth-century Normandy or the presence of the infinite in Kant’s noumenal realm.

  6.

  Christianity meanwhile looks at the purpose of education from another angle, because it has an entirely different concept of human nature. It has no patience with theories that dwell on our independence or our maturity. It instead believes us to be at heart desperate, fragile, vulnerable, sinful creatures, a good deal less wise than we are knowledgeable, always on the verge of anxiety, tortured by our relationships, terrified of death — and most of all in need of God.

  What sort of education might benefit such forlorn wretches? While the capacity for abstract thought is considered by Christianity to be in no way dishonourable, and indeed even a potential sign of divine grace, it is held to be of secondary importance to a more practical ability to bring consoling and nurturing ideas to bear on our disturbed and irresolute selves.

  We are familiar enough with the major categories of the humanities as they are taught in secular universities — history and anthropology, literature and philosophy — as well as with the sorts of examination questions they produce: Who were the Carolingians? Where did phenomenology originate? What did Emerson want? We know too that this scheme leaves the emotional aspects of our characters to develop spontaneously, or at the very least in private, perhaps when we are with our families or out on solitary walks in the countryside.

&n
bsp; In contrast, Christianity concerns itself from the outset with the inner confused side of us, declaring that we are none of us born knowing how to live; we are by nature fragile and capricious, unempathetic and beset by fantasies of omnipotence, worlds away from being able to command even a modicum of the good sense and calm that secular education takes as the starting point for its own pedagogy.

  Christianity is focused on helping a part of us that secular language struggles even to name, which is not precisely intelligence or emotion, not character or personality, but another, even more abstract entity loosely connected with all of those and yet differentiated from them by an additional ethical and transcendent dimension — and to which we may as well refer, following Christian terminology, as the soul. It has been the essential task of the Christian pedagogic machine to nurture, reassure, comfort and guide our souls.

  Throughout its history, Christianity indulged in lengthy debates as to the nature of the soul, speculating on what it might look like, where it might be located and how it might best be educated. In its origins, the soul was thought by theologians to resemble a miniature baby inserted by God into an infant’s mouth at the moment of his or her birth.

  The baby inside us that we must educate. Receiving one’s soul: illumination from an early fifteenth-century Bible. (illustration credit 4.5)

  At the other end of the individual’s life, at the moment of death, the soul-baby would then be expelled again through his or her mouth. The trajectory it was to follow would be more ambiguous this time: it would be either taken up by God or snatched away by the Devil, depending on how well or badly its owner had tended to it over the years. A good soul was one that had managed to find appropriate answers to the great questions and tensions of existence, a soul marked by such godly virtues as faith, hope, charity and love.

  Differ though we might with Christianity’s view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one — that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.

  By its own standards, Christianity therefore has no choice but to tilt its educational emphasis towards explicit questions: How can we manage to live together? How do we tolerate others’ faults? How can we accept our own limitations and assuage our anger? A degree of urgent didacticism is a requirement rather than an insult. The difference between Christian and secular education reveals itself with particular clarity in their respective characteristic modes of instruction: secular education delivers lectures, Christianity sermons. Expressed in terms of intent, we might say that one is concerned with imparting information, the other with changing our lives. Sermons by their very nature assume that their audiences are in important ways lost. The titles alone of the sermons by one of the most famous preachers of eighteenth-century England, John Wesley, show Christianity seeking to dispense practical advice about a range of the soul’s ordinary challenges: ‘On Being Kind’, ‘On Staying Obedient to Parents’, ‘On Visiting the Sick’, ‘On Caution Against Bigotry’. Unlikely though it seems that Wesley’s sermons could ever seduce atheists through their content, they nevertheless succeed, like any number of Christian texts, in categorizing knowledge under useful headings.

  An illumination from an early-fifteenth-century Book of Hours, showing a soul which has recently emerged from a deceased man and is being fought over by the Devil and St Michael. (illustration credit 4.6)

  While it was at first hoped by Arnold, Mill and others that universities could deliver secular sermons that would tell us how to avoid bigotry and find helpful things to say when visiting ill people, these centres of learning have never offered the kind of guidance that churches have focused on, from a belief that academia should refrain from making any associations between cultural works and individual sorrows. It would be a shocking affront to university etiquette to ask what Tess of the d’Urbervilles might usefully teach us about love, or to suggest that the novels of Henry James might be read with an eye to discovering parables about staying honest in a slippery mercantile world.

  Yet a search for parables is precisely what lies at the heart of the Christian approach to texts. Wesley himself was a profoundly scholarly man in ways that the modern university would honour. He had an intimate textual knowledge of Leviticus and Matthew, Corinthians and Luke, but he quoted verses from these only when they could be integrated into a parabolic structure and used to leaven the hardships of his listeners. Like all Christian sermonizers, he looked to culture principally as a tool, asking of any biblical passage what general rules of conduct it could exemplify and promote.

  Teaching wisdom rather than knowledge: John Wesley, a sermon outdoors in York, 1746. (illustration credit 4.7)

  In the secular sphere, we may well be reading the right books, but we too often fail to ask direct questions of them, declining to advance sufficiently vulgar, neo-religious enquiries because we are embarrassed to admit to the true nature of our inner needs. We are fatefully in love with ambiguity, uncritical of the Modernist doctrine that great art should have no moral content or desire to change its audience. Our resistance to a parabolic methodology stems from a confused distaste for utility, didacticism and simplicity, and from an unquestioned assumption that anything a child could understand must of necessity be infantile in nature.

  Yet Christianity holds that, despite outward appearances, important parts of us retain the elemental structures of earliest childhood. Just like children, therefore, we need assistance. Knowledge must be fed to us slowly and carefully, like food cut into manageable bites. Any more than a few lessons in a day will exhaust us unduly. Twelve lines of Deuteronomy may be enough, for instance, along with a few explanatory notes which point out in plain language what there is for us to notice and to feel therein.

  The techniques that the academy so fears — the emphasis on the connection between abstract ideas and our own lives, the lucid interpretation of texts, the preference for extracts over wholes — have always been the methods of religions, which had to wrestle, centuries before the invention of television, with the challenge of how to render ideas vivid and pertinent to impatient and distracted audiences. They have realized all along that the greatest danger they faced was not the oversimplification of concepts but the erosion of interest and support through incomprehension and apathy. They recognized that clarity preserves rather than undermines ideas, for it creates a base upon which the intellectual labour of an elite can subsequently rest. Christianity was confident that its precepts were robust enough to be understood at a variety of levels, that they could be presented in the form of crude woodcuts to the yeomen of the parish church or discussed in Latin by theologians at the University of Bologna, and that each iteration would endorse and reinforce the others.

  In the preface to a volume of his collected sermons, John Wesley explained and defended his adherence to simplicity: ‘I design plain truth for plain people: therefore … I abstain from all nice and philosophical speculations; from all perplexed and intricate reasonings; and, as far as possible, from even the show of learning. My design is … to forget all that ever I have read in my life.’

  A handful of brave secular writers have been able to express themselves with a similarly inspiring openness, among the most notable being Donald Winnicott in the field of psychoanalysis and Ralph Waldo Emerson in literature. But these characters have been regrettably few in number, and most have also drawn upon a religious background to mould and buttress their sensibilities (Winnicott began as a Methodist, Emerson as a Transcendentalist).

  The greatest Christian preachers have been vulgar in the very best sense. While not surrendering any of their claims to complexity or insight, they have wished to help those who came to hear them.

  7.

  By contrast, we have constructed an intellectual world whose most celebrated institutions rarely consent to ask, let alone answer, the most ser
ious questions of the soul. To address the incoherencies of the situation, we might begin to overhaul our universities by doing away with fields like history and literature, ultimately superficial categories which, even if they cover valuable material, do not in themselves track the themes that most torment and attract our souls.

  The redesigned universities of the future would draw upon the same rich catalogue of culture treated by their traditional counterparts, likewise promoting the study of novels, histories, plays and paintings, but they would teach this material with a view to illuminating students’ lives rather than merely prodding at academic goals. Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary would thus be assigned in a course on understanding the tensions of marriage instead of in one focused on narrative trends in nineteenth-century fiction, just as the recommendations of Epicurus and Seneca would appear in the syllabus for a course about dying rather than in a survey of Hellenistic philosophy.

  Departments would be required to confront the problematic areas of our lives head-on. Notions of assistance and transformation which presently hover ghost-like over speeches at graduation ceremonies would be given form and explored as openly in lay institutions as they are in churches. There would be classes in, among other topics, being alone, reconsidering work, improving relationships with children, reconnecting with nature and facing illness. A university alive to the true responsibilities of cultural artefacts within a secular age would establish a Department for Relationships, an Institute of Dying and a Centre for Self-Knowledge.

  In this way, as Arnold and Mill would have wished, secular education would start to outgrow the fears it associates with relevance and redesign its curricula to engage directly with our most pressing personal and ethical dilemmas.