I Wisdom without Doctrine
12 “we invented religions to serve two central needs which continue to this day and which secular society has not been able to solve with any particular skill: first, the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply rooted selfish and violent impulses. And second, the need to cope with terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability to professional failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones and to our decay and demise.”
15 “The challenge facing atheists is how to reverse the process of religious colonization: how to separate ideas and rituals from the religious institutions which have laid claim to them but don’t truly own them.”
II Community
i. Meeting Strangers
25 “We generally talk gladly to people only once we also have the option of avoiding them altogether. Whereas the Bedouin whose tent surveys a hundred kilometres of desolate sand has the psychological wherewithal to offer each stranger a warm welcome, his urban contemporaries, though at heart no less well meaning or generous, must – in order to preserve a modicum of inner serenity – give no sign of even noticing the millions of humans who are eating, sleeping, arguing, copulating and dying only centimetres away from them on all sides.”
26-27 “We are from a purely financial point of view greatly more generous than our ancestors ever were, surrendering up to half of our income for the communal good. But we do this almost without realizing it, through the anonymous agency of the taxation system; and if we think about it at all, it is likely to be with resentment that our money is being used to support unnecessary bureaucracies or to buy missiles. We seldom feel a connection to those less fortunate members of the polity for whom our taxes also buy clean sheets, soup, shelter or a daily dose of insulin. Neither recipient nor donor feels the need to say ‘Please’ or ‘Thank you’. Our donations are never framed – as they were in the Christian era – as the lifeblood of an intricate tangle of mutually interdependent relationships, with practical benefits for the recipient and spiritual ones for the donor.”
27-29 “Solitary though we may have become, we haven’t of course given up all hope of forming relationships. In the lonely canyons of the modern city, there is no more honoured emotion than love. However, this is not the love of which religions speak, not the expansive, universal brotherhood of mankind; it is a more jealous, restricted and ultimately meaner variety. It is a romantic love which sends us on a maniacal quest for a single person with whom we hope to achieve a life-long and complete communion, one person in particular who will spare us any need for people in general.” !!!
29 “Insofar as modern society ever promises us access to a community, it is one centred around the worship of professional success. We sense that we are brushing up against its gates when the first question we are asked at a party is ‘What do you do?’, our answer to which will determine whether we are warmly welcomed or conclusively abandoned by the peanuts. In these competitive, pseudo-communal gatherings, only a few of our attributes count as currency with which to buy the goodwill of strangers. […] Focusing on work to the exclusion of almost everything else is a plausible enough strategy in a world which accepts workplace achievements as the main tokens with which we can secure not just the financial means to survive physically, but also the attention that we require to thrive psychologically.” !!!
30-32 “a church, with its massive timber doors and 300 stone angels carved around its porch, gives us rare permission to lean over and say hello to a stranger without any danger of being thought predatory or insane. We are promised that here (in the words of the Mass’s initial greeting) ‘the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit’ belong to all who have assembled. The Church lends its enormous prestige, accrued through age, learning and architectural grandeur, to our shy desire to open ourselves to someone new.”
32 “In this secular age, we often assume that a love of family and a sense of community must be synonymous. When modern politicians speak of their wish to repair society, it is the family they hail as the quintessential symbol of community. But Christianity is wiser and less sentimental in this regard, for it acknowledges that an attachment to family may in fact narrow the circle of our affections, distracting us from the greater challenge of apprehending our connection with all of mankind; of learning to love kith as well as kin.”
37 “The liturgical complexity of a missal – the directive way in which this book of instructions for the celebration of a Mass compels the congregants to look up, stand, kneel, sing, pray, drink and eat at given points – speaks to an essential aspect of human nature which benefits from being guided in how to behave with others. To ensure that profound and dignified personal bonds can be forged, a tightly choreographed agenda of activities may be more effective than leaving a group to mingle aimlessly on its own.” !!!
39 “Before it was a service, before the congregants sat in seats facing an altar behind which a priest held up a wafer and a cup of wine, the Mass was a meal.”
46 “The Book of Agape would direct diners to speak to one another for prescribed lengths of time on predefined topics. […] these talking points would be carefully crafted for a specific purpose, to coax guests away from customary expressions of superbia (‘What do you do?’, ‘Where do your children go to school?’) and towards a more sincere revelation of themselves (‘What do you regret?’, ‘Whom can you not forgive?’, ‘What do you fear?’). The liturgy would, as in the Mass, inspire charity in the deepest sense, a capacity to respond with complexity and compassion to the existence of our fellow creatures.
One would be privy to accounts of fear, guilt, rage, melancholy, unrequited love and infidelity that would generate an impression of our collective insanity and endearing fragility. Our conversations would free us from some of our more distorted fantasies about others’ lives, by revealing the extent to which, behind our well-defended façades, most of us are going a little out of our minds – and so have reason to stretch out a hand to our equally tortured neighbours.”
ii. Apologies
55 “The Day of Atonement has the immense advantage of making the idea of saying sorry look like it came from somewhere else, the initiative of neither the perpetrator nor the victim.”
57 “A period in which human error is proclaimed as a general truth makes it easier to confess to specific infractions. It is more bearable to own up to our follies when the highest authority has told us that we are all childishly yet forgivably demented to begin with.”
iii. Our Hatred of Community
61 “It is hard to attend most wedding parties without realizing that these celebrations are at some level also marking a sorrow, the entombment of sexual liberty and individual curiosity for the sake of children and social stability, with compensation from the community being delivered through gifts and speeches.”
61-62 “Religions are wise in not expecting us to deal with all of our emotions on our own. They know how confusing and humiliating it can be to have to admit to despair, lust, envy or egomania. They understand the difficulty we have in finding a way to tell our mother unaided that we are furious with her or our child that we envy him or our prospective spouse that the idea of marriage alarms as much as it delights us. They hence give us special days under the cover of which our pestiferous feelings can be processed. They give us lines to recite and songs to sing while they carry us across the treacherous regions of our psyches.” !!
65-66 “The moral we should draw is that if we want well-functioning communities, we cannot be naive about our nature. We must fully accept the depths of our destructive, antisocial feelings. We shouldn’t banish feasting and debauchery to the margins, to be mopped up by the police and frowned upon by commentators. We should give chaos pride of place once a year or so, designating occasions on which we can be briefly exempted from the two greatest pressures of secular adult life: having to be rational and having to be faithful.” !!
III Kindness
i. Libertarianism and Paternalism
70 “Freedom has become our supreme political virtue. It is not thought to be the state’s task to promote a vision of how we should act towards one another or to send us to hear lectures about chivalry and politeness. Modern politics, on both left and right, is dominated by what we can call a libertarian ideology.”
77 “The exhortations we would need are typically not very complex: forgive others, be slow to anger, dare to imagine things from another’s point of view, set your dramas in perspective … We are holding to an unhelpfully sophisticated view of ourselves if we think that we are always above hearing well-placed, blunt and simply structured reminders about kindness. There is greater wisdom in accepting that we are in most situations rather simple entities in want of much the same kind, firm, basic guidance as is naturally offered to children and domestic animals. […]
We have grown sick from being left to do as we please without sufficient wisdom to exploit our liberty. It is not primarily the case that we find ourselves at the mercy of paternalistic authorities whose claims we resent and want to be free of. The danger runs in an opposite direction: we face temptations which we revile in those interludes when we can attain a sufficient distance from them, but which we lack any encouragement to resist, much to our eventual self-disgust and disappointment. The mature sides of us watch in despair as the infantile aspects of us trample upon our more elevated principles and ignore what we most fervently revere. Our deepest wish may be that someone would come along and save us from ourselves.” !!!
79-80 “It seems clear that the origins of religious ethics lay in the pragmatic need of the earliest communities to control their members’ tendencies towards violence, and to foster in them contrary habits of harmony and forgiveness. […] So vital were these rules to our survival that for thousands of years we did not dare to admit that we ourselves had formulated them, lest this expose them to critical scrutiny and irreverent handling. We had to pretend that morality came from the heavens in order to insulate it from our own prevarications and frailties. […]
We no longer have to be brought into line by the threat of hell or the promise of paradise; we merely have to be reminded that it is we ourselves – that is, the most mature and reasonable parts of us (seldom present in the midst of our crises and obsessions) – who want to lead the sort of life which we once imagined supernatural beings demanded of us. An adequate evolution of morality from superstition to reason should mean recognizing ourselves as the authors of our own moral commandments.” !!
82 “The Judaeo-Christian tradition has intermittently appreciated that what can stop us from reforming ourselves is a lonely, guilty sense of how unusually bad and beyond saving we already are. These religions have therefore proclaimed with considerable sangfroid that all of us, without exception, are appallingly flawed creations.”
82-83 “The doctrine of Original Sin encourages us to inch towards moral improvement by understanding that the faults we despise in ourselves are inevitable features of the species. We can therefore admit to them candidly and attempt to rectify them in the light of day. The doctrine knows that shame is not a helpful emotion for us to be weighed down with as we work towards having a little less to be ashamed about. Enlightenment thinkers believed that they were doing us a favour by declaring man to be originally and naturally good. However, being repeatedly informed of our native decency can cause us to become paralysed with remorse over our failure to measure up to impossible standards of integrity. Confessions of universal sinfulness turn out to be a better starting point from which to take our first modest steps towards virtue.”
ii. A Moral Atmosphere
87 “our public spaces are not even remotely neutral. They are – as a quick glance down any high street will reveal – covered with commercial messages. Even in societies theoretically dedicated to leaving us free to make our own choices, our minds are continuously manipulated in directions we hardly consciously recognize.”
90 “If we tend to think so often about lemon-scented floor polish or cracked black pepper crisps, but relatively little about endurance or justice, the fault is not merely our own. It is also that these two cardinal virtues are not generally in a position to become clients of Young & Rubicam.” !!
iii. Role Models
95 “An absence of religious belief in no way invalidates a continuing need for ‘patron saints’ of qualities like Courage, Friendship, Fidelity, Patience, Confidence or Scepticism.”
95-96 “The religious perspective on morality suggests that it is in the end a sign of immaturity to object too strenuously to being treated like a child. The libertarian obsession with freedom ignores how much of our original childhood need for constraint and guidance endures within us, and therefore how much we stand to learn from paternalistic strategies. It is not very kind, nor ultimately even very freeing, to be deemed so grown up that one is left alone to do entirely as one pleases.”
IV Education
i. What We Get Taught
102 JOHN STUART MILL “The object of universities is not to make skilful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings.”
105 “Whatever rhetoric may be rehearsed in its prospectuses, the modern university appears to have precious little interest in teaching its students any emotional or ethical life skills, much less how to love their neighbours and leave the world happier than they found it.”
105-106 “Graduation speeches stereotypically identify liberal education with the acquisition of wisdom and self-knowledge, but these goals have little bearing on the day-to-day methods of departmental instruction and examination. To judge by what they do rather than what they airily declaim, universities are in the business of turning out a majority of tightly focused professionals (lawyers, physicians, engineers) and a minority of culturally well-informed but ethically confused arts graduates aptly panicked about how they might remuneratively occupy the rest of their lives.
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.” !!
109 “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”
115 “we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.”
119 “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.”
119 “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.” !!!
119-120 “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.”
121 “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.”
ii. How We Are Taught
124 “We all possess wisdom that we lack the strength properly to enact in our lives. Christianity pictures the mind as a sluggish and fickle organ, easy enough to impress but forever inclined to change its focus and cast its commitments aside. Consequently, the religion proposes that the central issue for education is not so much how to counteract ignorance – as secular educators imply – as how we can combat our reluctance to act upon ideas which we have already fully understood at a theoretical level.” !!
125 “Ever since Plato attacked the Greek sophists for being more concerned with speaking well than thinking honestly, Western intellectuals have been intransigently suspicious of eloquence, whether spoken or written, believing that the fluent pedagogue could unfairly disguise unacceptable or barren notions with honeyed words. The way an idea is imparted has been deemed to be of little importance next to the quality of the idea itself. The modern university has thus placed no premium on a talent for oratory, priding itself on its interest in the truth rather than in techniques to ensure its successful and enduring conveyance.”
132-133 “Aside from needing to be delivered eloquently, ideas also have to be repeated to us constantly. Three or five or ten times a day, we must be forcibly reminded of truths that we love but otherwise will not be able to hold on to. What we read at nine in the morning we will have forgotten by lunchtime and will need to reread by dusk. Our inner lives must be lent a structure and our best thoughts reinforced to counter the continuous pull of distraction and disintegration. […]
How free secular society leaves us by contrast. It expects that we will spontaneously find our way to the ideas that matter to us and gives us weekends off for consumption and recreation. Like science, it privileges discovery. It associates repetition with punitive shortage, presenting us with an incessant stream of new information – and therefore it prompts us to forget everything.”
136-137 “We are more alarmed by the potentially asphyxiating effects of being compelled to have structured encounters with ideas than by the notion that we might otherwise be in danger of forgetting them altogether.” !!!
138 “in attempting to follow the narrative of man’s ambitious progress towards a state of technological and political perfection – we have sacrificed an opportunity to remind ourselves of quieter truths which we know about in theory and forget to live by in practice.” !!
138-139 “If we lament our book-swamped age, it is because we sense that it is not by reading more, but by deepening and refreshing our understanding of a few volumes that we best develop our intelligence and our sensitivity. We feel guilty for all that we have not yet read, but overlook how much better read we already are than Augustine or Dante, thereby ignoring that our problem lies squarely with our manner of absorption rather than with the extent of our consumption.” !!
139-140 “We should be prepared to swap a few of our swiftly disintegrating paperbacks for volumes that would proclaim, through the weight and heft of their materials, the grace of their typography and the beauty of their illustrations, our desire for their contents to assume a permanent place in our hearts.” !!
iii. Spiritual Exercises
147 “Catholic retreats continue even today to provide their guests with comfortable accommodations, extensive libraries and spiritual activities ranging from the ‘examen’ – a thrice-daily survey of the conscience, carried out alone and in silence (usually with a lighted candle and a statuette of Jesus) – to sessions with counsellors who have been specially trained to inject logic and morality into believers’ confused and corrupted thought processes.”
155 “Because it is the ego’s habit to try to exploit and use as an instrument all that it encounters, it is unaware of the body except insofar as it is useful to its projects for sensory gratification. It is latently resentful of and appalled by its fragility.”
V Tenderness
168-171 “While for long stretches of our lives we can believe in our maturity, we never succeed in insulating ourselves against the kind of catastrophic events that sweep away our ability to reason, our courage and our resourcefulness at putting dramas in perspective and throw us back into a state of primordial helplessness.
At such moments we may long to be held and reassured, as we were decades ago by some sympathetic adult, most likely our mother, a person who made us feel physically protected, stroked our hair, looked at us with benevolence and tenderness and perhaps said not very much other than, very quietly, ‘of course’.
Though such longings go largely unmentioned in adult society, it has been the achievement of religions to know how to reanimate and legitimate them.”
171-172 “the moment one breaks down isn’t so much when things are hard as when one finally encounters kindness and a chance to admit to sorrows one has been harbouring in silence for too long.”
173-175 “At its most withering and intellectually pugnacious, atheism has attacked religion for blinding itself to its own motives, for being unwilling to acknowledge that it is, at base, nothing more than a glorified response to childhood longings which have been dressed up, recast in new forms and projected into the heavens.
This charge may well be correct. The problem is that those who level it are themselves often involved in a denial, a denial of the needs of childhood. In their zeal to attack believers whose frailties have led them to embrace the supernatural, atheists may neglect the frailty that is an inevitable feature of all our lives. They may label as childish particular needs which should really be honoured as more generally human, for there is in truth no maturity without an adequate negotiation with the infantile and no such thing as a grown-up who does not regularly yearn to be comforted like a child.
Christianity describes the capacity to accept dependence as a mark of moral and spiritual health. Only the proud and vainglorious would attempt to deny their weaknesses, while the devout can declare without awkwardness, as a sign of their faith, that they have spent time in tears at the foot of a statue of a giant wooden mother.” !!!!
176 “It would be useful if our secular artists were occasionally to create works which took parental care as their central theme, and if architects designed spaces, whether in museums or, more ambitiously, in new Temples to Tenderness, where we could contemplate these new works in a twilight ambience.”
176 “In rejecting superstition, we should take care that we aren’t tempted to ignore the less respectable longings which religions have been so successful in identifying and dignified in resolving.” !!!
VI Pessimism
181 “we are usually cast into gloom not so much by negativity as by hope. It is hope – with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians and our planet – that is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us. The incompatibility between the grandeur of our aspirations and the mean reality of our condition generates the violent disappointments which rack our days and etch themselves in lines of acrimony across our faces.
Hence the relief, which can explode into bursts of laughter, when we finally come across an author generous enough to confirm that our very worst insights, far from being unique and shameful, are part of the common, inevitable reality of mankind. Our dread that we might be the only ones to feel anxious, bored, jealous, cruel, perverse and narcissistic turns out to be gloriously unfounded, opening up unexpected opportunities for communion around our dark realities.”
182 “one of this world’s dominant characteristics, and certainly its greatest flaw, is its optimism.
Despite occasional moments of panic, most often connected to market crises, wars or pandemics, the secular age maintains an all but irrational devotion to a narrative of improvement, based on a messianic faith in the three great drivers of change: science, technology and commerce. Material improvements since the mid-eighteenth century have been so remarkable, and have so exponentially increased our comfort, safety, wealth and power, as to deal an almost fatal blow to our capacity to remain pessimistic – and therefore, crucially, to our ability to stay sane and content.” !!
182-183 “Yet while it is undeniable that the scientific and economic trajectories of mankind have been pointed firmly in an upward direction for several centuries, we do not comprise mankind: none of us individuals can dwell exclusively amidst the ground-breaking developments in genetics or telecommunications that lend our age its distinctive and buoyant prejudices. We may derive some benefit from the availability of hot baths and computer chips, but our lives are no less subject to accident, frustrated ambition, heartbreak, jealousy, anxiety or death than were those of our medieval forebears. But at least our ancestors had the advantage of living in a religious era which never made the mistake of promising its population that happiness could ever make a permanent home for itself on this earth.” !!
183-185 “The secular are at this moment in history a great deal more optimistic than the religious – something of an irony, given the frequency with which the latter have been derided by the former for their apparent naivety and credulousness. It is the secular whose longing for perfection has grown so intense as to lead them to imagine that paradise might be realized on this earth after just a few more years of financial growth and medical research.”
185 “It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships.”
187 “The faiths have the good sense to provide us with angels to worship and lovers to tolerate.”
188 “Accepting that existence is inherently frustrating, that we are forever hemmed in by atrocious realities, can give us the impetus to say ‘Thank you’ a little more often.”
189 “Religions have wisely insisted that we are inherently flawed creatures: incapable of lasting happiness, beset by troubling sexual desires, obsessed by status, vulnerable to appalling accidents and always slowly dying.” !!
VII Perspective
196-198 “[The Book of Job] suggests that it is not for us to know why events occur in the way they do, that we should not always interpret pain as punishment and that we should recall that we live in a universe riddled with mysteries, of which the vagaries in our fortunes are certainly not the largest or even, as we will become aware if only we can look at matters from a sufficient remove, among the most important. […] Job’s direct challenge regarding God’s existence and ethical intentions is thus met with an indirect response, wherein the deity goes on at length about how little humans know of anything. Fragile, limited creatures that they are, how can they possibly understand the ways of God? he demands. And given their ignorance, what right do they have to use such words as undeserved and unmerited?”
199-200 “rather than try to redress our humiliations by insisting on our wronged importance, we should instead endeavour to apprehend and appreciate our essential nothingness.”
200 “Being put in our place by something larger, older, greater than ourselves is not a humiliation; it should be accepted as a relief from our insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives.”
201-202 “Myopically, the scientific authorities who are officially in charge of interpreting the stars for the rest of us seem rarely to recognize the therapeutic import of their subject matter. In austere scientific language, the space agencies inform us of the properties and paths of the heavenly bodies, yet they seldom consider astronomy as either a source of wisdom or a plausible corrective to suffering.
Science should matter to us not only because it helps us to control parts of the world, but also because it shows us things that we will never master. Thus we would do well to meditate daily, rather as the religious do on their God, on the 9.5 trillion kilometres which comprise a single light year, or perhaps on the luminosity of the largest known star in our galaxy, Eta Carinae, 7,500 light years distant, 400 times the size of the sun and 4 million times as bright. We should punctuate our calendars with celebrations in honour of VY Canis Majoris, a red hypergiant in the constellation Canis Major, 5,000 light years from earth and 2,100 times bigger than our sun. Nightly – perhaps after the main news bulletin and before the celebrity quiz – we might observe a moment of silence in order to contemplate the 200 to 400 billion stars in our galaxy, the 100 billion galaxies and the 3 septillion stars in the universe. Whatever their value may be to science, the stars are in the end no less valuable to mankind as solutions to our megalomania, self-pity and anxiety.
To answer our need to be repeatedly connected through our senses to ideas of transcendence, we should insist that a percentage of all prominently positioned television screens on public view be hooked up to live feeds from the transponders of our extraplanetary telescopes.” [??FACTS SHOULD BE FIXED??; e.g., Eta Carinae is a system of at least two stars, “largest” should probably be “most massive”, but that’s not correct either–FL]
VIII Art
209-210 “The fundamental question which the modern museum has unusual but telling difficulty in answering is why art should matter.” !!
210 “It was no coincidence that during the period of revolutionary government in France in 1792, only three days separated the declaration of the state’s official severance from the Catholic Church and the inauguration of the Palais du Louvre as the country’s first national museum. The Louvre’s galleries were quickly filled with items looted from French Catholic churches, and subsequently, thanks to Napoleon’s campaigns, from monasteries and chapels across Europe.” !!
215 “Christianity, by contrast, never leaves us in any doubt about what art is for: it is a medium to remind us about what matters.”
217 “we need art because we are so forgetful.”
229 “The unreliability of our native imaginative powers magnifies our need for art. We depend on artists to orchestrate moments of compassion to excite our sympathies on a regular basis; to create artificial conditions under which we can experience, in relation to the figures we see in works of art, some of what we might one day feel towards flesh-and-blood people in our own lives.”
233 “The range of possible perspectives in any scene – and the range, therefore, of responses available to the viewer – reveals the responsibilities which fall to the makers of images: to direct us to those who deserve but often do not win our sympathy, to stand as witnesses to all that it would be easier for us to turn away from.”
233 “a good artist by Christian standards is one who successfully animates the important moral and psychological truths which are in danger of losing their hold on us amid the distracted conditions of daily existence.”
235 “Militating against this mission are all manner of visual clichés. The real difficulty with the ideas which underlie compassion is not that they seem surprising or peculiar, but rather that they seem far too obvious: their very reasonableness and ubiquity strip them of their power. To cite a verbal parallel, we have heard a thousand times that we should love our neighbour, but the prescription loses any of its meaning when it is merely repeated by rote.
So too with art: the most dramatic scenes, painted without talent or imagination, generate only indifference and boredom. The task for artists is therefore to find new ways of prising open our eyes to tiresomely familiar yet critical ideas. The history of Christian art comprises waves of assaults on the great old truths by geniuses who tried to ensure that viewers would be astonished anew and provoked to inner amendment by the humility of the Virgin, the fidelity of Joseph, the courage of Jesus or the sadism of the Jewish authorities.”
237-239 “Intriguingly, Christianity never expected its artists to decide what their works would be about; it was left to theologians and doctors of divinity to formulate the important themes, which were only then passed on to painters and sculptors and turned into convincing aesthetic phenomena. The Church implicitly wondered why a mastery of the technical aspects of art – a talent for making a dab of paint look like an elbow, or a patch of stone like hair – should be thought to be compatible with the ability to work out the meaning of life. The religion did not, on top of everything else, expect that Titian could be a gifted philosopher. It may be that we are asking too much of our own secular artists, requiring them not only to impress our senses but also to be the originators of profound psychological and moral insights. Our artistic scene might benefit from greater collaborations between thinkers and makers of images, a marriage of the best ideas with their highest expressions.
Christianity was also wise in not insisting that the concepts behind works of art should change all the time. There have been few more harmful doctrines for art than the Romantic belief that greatness must involve constant originality at a thematic level.”
242 “Despite a powerful elite prejudice against guidance, works of art are rarely diminished by being accompanied by instruction manuals.” !!
244 “The challenge is to rewrite the agendas for our museums so that art can begin to serve the needs of psychology as effectively as, for centuries, it has served those of theology. Curators should dare to reinvent their spaces so that they can be more than dead libraries for the creations of the past. These curators should co-opt works of art to the direct task of helping us to live: to achieve self-knowledge, to remember forgiveness and love and to stay sensitive to the pains suffered by our ever troubled species and its urgently imperilled planet. Museums must be more than places for displaying beautiful objects. They should be places that use beautiful objects in order to try to make us good and wise. Only then will museums be able to claim that they have properly fulfilled the noble but still elusive ambition of becoming our new churches.” !!
IX Architecture
248 “In its tolerance of landscapes which generally leave us no option but to look at our feet, the modern world is resolutely, and in a secular sense, Protestant.
When Protestantism took hold in northern Europe in the first half of the sixteenth century, it manifested an extreme hostility towards the visual arts, attacking Catholics for their complicated and richly decorated buildings.”
253 “In arguing for the importance of architecture, Catholicism was making a point, half touching, half alarming, about the way we function. It was suggesting that we suffer from a heightened sensitivity to what is around us, that we will notice and be affected by everything our eyes light upon, a vulnerability to which Protestantism has frequently preferred to remain blind or indifferent. Catholicism was making the remarkable allegation that we need to have good architecture around us in order to grow into, and remain, good people.”
– A Temple to Perspective
259-260 “To be made to ‘feel small’ is, to be sure, a painful daily reality of the human playground. But to be made to feel small by something mighty, noble, accomplished and intelligent is to have wisdom presented to us along with a measure of delight.”
– A Temple to Reflection
267 “There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it. We can be sure that we have something especially crucial to address when the very notion of being alone grows unbearable.”
X Institutions
i. Books vs. Institutions
279 “Romanticism has taught us to mock the ponderousness and strictures of institutions, their tendencies to corruption and their tolerance of mediocrity. The ideal of the intellectual has been that of a free spirit living beyond the confines of any system, disdainful of money, cut off from practical affairs and privately proud of being unable to read a balance sheet.”
280 “Religion’s great distinction is that while it has a collective power comparable to that of modern corporations pushing the sale of soap and mashed potatoes, it addresses precisely those inner needs which the secular world leaves to disorganized and vulnerable individuals.
The challenge is hence to create – via a study of religious institutions – secular entities that could meet the needs of the inner self with all the force and skill that corporations currently apply to satisfying the needs of the outer.” !!!
280-281 “Whereas Romanticism glorifies the achievements of singular heroes, religions know how much will be impossible if individuals act alone. Outside of an organization, we may now and then succeed in securing a brief spike of fame for ourselves, but we will never be able to place our achievements on a stable footing, consistently replicate our insights or bridge our weaknesses. Sole authorship cannot be a logical long-term response to solving the complexities of significant issues. We should ask why in matters of the soul we continue to believe in cloistered, companionless methods of assembly that we long ago disavowed in relation to the manufacture of pharmaceuticals or aircraft.”
282 “Whatever modern democracies may tell themselves about their commitment to free speech and to diversity of opinion, the values of a given society will uncannily match those of whichever organizations have the scale to pay for runs of thirty-second slots around the nightly news bulletin.”
283-284 “A lone thinker may be near the end of his or her life – or even, like Nietzsche, long dead – before the public notices that a good idea has sprung from someone without corporate status. Within an institution, all members can tap into a reputation built up by illustrious forebears and reinforced by elegant buildings and sleek bureaucratic processes. They can take on an ancient title – priest or archdeacon, professor or minister – and make use, for genuine ends, of the resources and lustre stored within a structure that is larger and more enduring than themselves.
Many would no doubt argue that modern society must already have all the institutions it needs. In practice, however, those who are drawn to what Catholicism has termed cura animarum, ‘the care of souls’, but who feel unable to effect this care in religious ways, are all too likely to end up compromised for want of a coherent network of colleagues, a tolerable income and a stable and dignified professional structure within which to operate. It is a measure of how deeply ingrained the problem is that we would even now struggle to give Nietzsche a professional home.” !!
285 “While the sight of a cross emblazoned on the side of an ecclesiastical building or a lamb embroidered on an altar cloth has frequently prompted the observation that Christianity was an early and adept practitioner of the same kind of ‘branding’ that our modern corporations specialize in, the truth is, of course, the reverse: it is the corporations that have faithfully adopted the lessons in identity pioneered by religions.
The most important function of a brand is to promote consistency. Institutions trust that the appearance of their logo, whether on a remote mountainside or on top of a skyscraper, on a bedsheet or on a cloak, will instantly communicate the reliable presence of a particular set of values and act as a promise of uniformity and quality.
The enemy of branding is local variation.” !!
289 “It is a singularly regrettable feature of the modern world that while some of the most trivial of our requirements (for shampoo and moisturizers, for example, as well as pasta sauce and sunglasses) are met by superlatively managed brands, our essential needs are left in the disorganized and unpredictable care of lone actors.”
298 “We need institutions to foster and protect those emotions to which we are sincerely inclined but which, without a supporting structure and a system of active reminders, we will be too distracted and undisciplined to make time for.
The secular, Romantic world sees in commodification only loss, of diversity, quality and spontaneity. But at its finest the process enables fragile, rare but important aspects of existence to be more easily identified and more dependably shared. Those of us who hold no religious or supernatural beliefs still require regular, ritualized encounters with concepts such as friendship, community, gratitude and transcendence. We cannot rely on being able to make our way to them on our own. We need institutions that can remind us that we need them and present them to us in appealing wrappings – thus ensuring the nourishment of the most forgetful and un-self-aware sides of our souls.”
ii. Auguste Comte
300-307 “[Auguste] Comte’s ideas proceeded from a characteristically blunt observation that in the modern world, thanks to the discoveries of science, it would no longer be possible for anyone intelligent to believe in God. Faith would henceforth be limited to the uneducated, the fanatical, children and those suffering the final stages of incurable diseases. At the same time, Comte recognized, as many of his contemporaries did not, that a secular society devoted solely to the accumulation of wealth, scientific discovery, popular entertainment and romantic love – a society lacking in any sources of ethical instruction, consolation, transcendent awe or solidarity – would fall prey to untenable social maladies. […]
Comte sought above all else to correct the dangers to which he felt modern atheists were exposed. He believed that capitalism had aggravated people’s competitive, individualistic impulses and distanced them from their communities, their traditions and their sympathies with nature. He criticized the nascent mass media for coarsening sensibilities and closing off chances for self-reflection, seclusion and original thought. In the same breath, he blamed the cult of Romanticism for putting too much strain on the conventional family and for promoting a falsely egoistic understanding of love. He lamented the arbitrary way in which, as soon as people felt they could no longer credit Jesus’s status as a divine being, they also had to forgo all the wisdom promulgated by Christianity. Comte at first hoped that secular schools and universities could become the new educators of the soul, imparting ethical lessons rather than mere information to their students, but he came to realize that capitalism would in the end always favour a skilled, obedient and unintrospective workforce over an inquisitive and emotionally balanced one.
Comte’s overall scheme for his religion began with a plan for an enormous new priesthood, which would employ 100,000 people in France alone. Despite the shared title, these priests were to be very different from those of the Catholic Church: they would be married, well integrated into the community and entirely secular, combining the skills of philosophers, writers and what we would now call psychotherapists. Their mission was to nurture the capacities for happiness and the moral sense of their fellow citizens. They would engage in therapeutic conversations with those plagued by problems at work or in love, deliver secular sermons and write jargon-free philosophical texts on the art of living. Along the way, this new priesthood would provide steady employment for the sort of people (among whose ranks Comte counted himself) who possessed a strong desire to help others and cultural and aesthetic interests, but who had been stymied by an inability to find work in universities and were thus forced to eke out an insecure living by writing for newspapers or peddling books to an indifferent public. […]
Comte’s greatest conceptual error was to label his scheme a religion. Those who have given up on faith rarely feel indulgent towards this emotive word, nor are most adult, independent-minded atheists much attracted to the idea of joining a cult. That Comte was not particularly sensitive to such subtleties was made clear when he began to refer to himself as ‘the Great Priest’, a pronouncement which must at a stroke have wiped out his appeal among the more balanced members of his audience.”
307 “good ideas will not be able to flourish if they are always left inside books. In order to thrive, they must be supported by institutions of a kind that only religions have so far known how to build.” !!!
iii. Conclusion
310 “Whereas we are for the most part well disposed to embrace the new in technology, when it comes to social practices, we are as deeply devoted to sticking with what we know. We are reassured by traditional ways of handling education, relationships, leisure time, ceremonies and manners. We are especially resistant to innovations which can be pegged to the thought of one person alone. To have the best chance of being taken up, ideas should seem like the product of common sense or collective wisdom rather than an innovation put forward by any single individual. What would likely be seen as a bold innovation in software can too easily, in the social sphere, come across as a cult of personality.”
312 “The wisdom of the faiths belongs to all of mankind, even the most rational among us, and deserves to be selectively reabsorbed by the supernatural’s greatest enemies.”