Nothing to Be Frightened Of (4 page)

At this school, music came every morning attached to a thunderous organ and nonsensical hymns. “There is a green hill far away / Without a city wall / Where the dear Lord was crucified / Who died to save us all.” The tune was less dreary than most; but why would anyone want a city wall built around a green hill anyway? Later, when I understood that “without” meant “outside,” I switched my puzzlement to the “green.” There is a
green
hill? In Palestine? We didn’t do much geography now that we were in long trousers (if you were clever you gave it up), but even I knew it was all sand and stones out there. I didn’t feel an anthropologist among the anthropophagi—I was now part of a quorum of scepticism—but I certainly sensed a distance between words familiar to me and meanings attached to them.

Once a year, on Lord Mayor’s Prize Day, we would sing “Jerusalem,” which had been adopted as the school song. It was a tradition among the rowdier boys—a posse of unreformed Low Voices—to launch at a given moment into an unmarked and frowned-upon fortissimo: “Bring me my arrows [
slight pause
] OF-DEE-SIRE.” Did I know the words were by Blake? I doubt it. Nor was there any attempt to promote religion through the beauty of its language (perhaps this was regarded as selfevident). We had an elderly Latin master who liked to stray from the script into what posed as private musings but which were, I now realize, a calculated technique. He came on like a prim and sober clergyman, but would then mutter, as if it had just occurred to him, something like, “She was only an Arab’s daughter, but you should have seen Gaza strip,” a joke far too risqué to retail to my own school-teaching parents. On another occasion, he grew satirical about the absurd title of a book called
The Bible Designed to Be Read as Literature.
We chuckled along with him, but from a contrary angle: the Bible (boring) was obviously
not
designed to be read as literature (exciting), QED.

Among us nominal Christians, there were a few boys who were devout, but they were regarded as slightly weird, as rare—and as weird—as the master who wore a wedding ring and could be made to blush (he was devout too). In late adolescence, I had an out-of-body experience once, possibly twice: the sense of being up near the ceiling looking down at my untenanted flesh. I mentioned this to the schoolfriend with the elastic-sided boots—but not to my family; and while I found it a matter for mild pride (something’s happening!), I didn’t deduce anything significant, let alone religious.

It was probably Alex Brilliant who passed on Nietzsche’s news that God was officially dead, which meant we could all wank away the merrier for it. You made your own life, didn’t you—that was what Existentialism was all about. And our zestful young English master was implicitly against religion. At least, he quoted the Blake that sounded like the opposite of “Jerusalem”: “For Old Nobodaddy aloft / Farted & Belch’d & cough’d.” God farted! God belched! That proved He didn’t exist! (Again, I never thought to take these human traits as arguments for the existence, indeed the sympathetic nature, of the deity.) He also quoted to us Eliot’s bleak summary of human life: birth, and copulation, and death. Halfway into his own natural span, this English master, like Alex Brilliant, was to kill himself, in a pills-and-drink suicide pact with his wife.

I went up to Oxford. I was asked to call on the college chaplain, who explained that as a scholar I had the right to read the lesson in chapel. Newly freed from the compulsions of hypocritical worship, I replied, “I’m afraid I’m a happy atheist.” Nothing ensued—no clap of thunder, loss of scholar’s gown, or rictus of disapproval; I finished my sherry and left. A day or two later, the captain of boats knocked on my door and asked if I wanted to try out for the river. I replied—with perhaps greater boldness, having faced down the chaplain—“I’m afraid I’m an aesthete.” I wince now for my reply (and rather wish I’d rowed); but again, nothing happened. No gang of hearties broke into my room looking to smash the blue china I did not possess, or to thrust my bookish head down a lavatory bowl.

I was able to state my position, but too shy to argue it. Had I been articulate—or crass—I might have explained to both cleric and oarsman that being an atheist and being an aesthete went together: just as being Muscular and being Christian once had for them. (Although sport might still provide a useful analogy: hadn’t Camus said that the proper response to life’s meaninglessness was to invent rules for the game, as we had done with football?) I might have gone on—in my fantasy rebuttal—to quote them Gautier’s lines: “
Les dieux eux-mêmes meurent.
/
Mais les vers souverains
/
Demeurent
/
Plus forts que les airains.
” [The Gods themselves die out, but Poetry, stronger even than bronze, survives everything.] I might have explained how religious rapture had long ago given way to aesthetic rapture, and perhaps topped it off with a cheesy sneer about St. Teresa manifestly not seeing God in that famous ecstatic sculpture but enjoying something altogether more corporeal.

When I said that I was a happy atheist, the adjective should be taken as applying to that noun and no further. I was happy not to believe in God; I was happy to have been academically successful so far; and that was about it. I was consumed with anxieties I tried to hide. If I was intellectually capable (while suspecting myself of being merely a trained exam-passer), I was socially, emotionally, and sexually immature. And if I was happy to be free of Old Nobodaddy, I wasn’t blithe about the consequences. No God, no Heaven, no afterlife; so death, however distant, was on the agenda in quite a different way.

Chapter 5

While I was at university, I spent a year in France, teaching at a Catholic school in Brittany. The priests I lived among surprised me by being as humanly various as civilians. One kept bees, another was a Druid; one bet on horses, another was anti-Semitic; this young one talked to his pupils about masturbation; that old one was addicted to films on television, even if he liked to dismiss them afterwards with the lofty phrase “lacking both interest and morality.” Some of the priests were intelligent and sophisticated, others stupid and credulous; some evidently pious, others sceptical to the point of blasphemy. I remember the shock around the refectory table when the subversive Père Marais started baiting the Druidical Père Calvard about which of their home villages got a better quality of Holy Ghost coming down at Pentecost. It was also here that I saw my first dead body: that of Père Roussel, a young teaching priest. His corpse was laid out in an anteroom by the school’s front entrance; boys and staff were encouraged to visit him. I did no more than gaze through the glass of the double doors, telling myself that this was tact; whereas in all probability it was only fear.

The priests treated me in a kindly way, a little teasing, a little incomprehending. “Ah,” they would say, stopping me in the corridor, touching my arm and offering a shy smile, “
La perfide Albion.
” Among their number was a certain Père Hubert de Goësbriand, a dim if good-hearted fellow who might have acquired his grand, aristocratic Breton name in a raffle, so little did it fit him. He was in his early fifties, plump, slow, hairless, and deaf. His main pleasure in life was to play practical jokes at mealtimes on the timid school secretary, M. Lhomer: surreptitiously stuffing cutlery into his pocket, blowing cigarette smoke in his face, tickling his neck, shoving the mustard pot unexpectedly under his nose. The school secretary displayed a truly Christian endurance to these tedious daily provocations. At first, Père de Goësbriand used to poke me in the ribs or pull my hair every time he passed me, until I cheerfully called him a bastard and he stopped. During the war he had been wounded in the left buttock (“Running away, Hubert!” “No, we were surrounded”), so travelled cheap-rate and had a subscription to a magazine for
Anciens Combattants.
The other priests treated him with head-shaking indulgence. “
Pauvre Hubert
” was the most common remark heard at mealtimes, whether as a muttered aside or shouted directly into his face.

De Goësbriand had just celebrated twenty-five years as a priest, and took his faith very straightforwardly. He was shocked when, listening in on my conversation with Père Marais, he discovered that I hadn’t been baptised.
Pauvre Hubert
became immediately concerned on my behalf, and spelled out to me the dire theological consequences: that without baptism I had no chance of getting to Heaven. Perhaps because of my outcast status, he would sometimes admit to me the frustrations and restrictions of the priestly life. One day, he cautiously confided, “You don’t think I’d go through all this unless there was Heaven at the end of it, do you?”

At the time, I was half impressed by such practical thinking, half appalled at a life wasted in vain hope. But Père de Goësbriand’s calculation had a distinguished history, and I might have recognized it as a workaday version of Pascal’s famous wager. The Pascalian bet sounds simple enough. If you believe, and God turns out to exist, you win. If you believe, and God turns out not to exist, you lose, but not half as badly as you would if you chose not to believe, only to find out after death that God does exist. It is, perhaps, not so much an argument as a piece of self-interested position-taking worthy of the French diplomatic corps; though the primary wager, on God’s existence, does depend on a second and simultaneous wager, on God’s nature. What if God is not as imagined? What, for instance, if He disapproves of gamblers, especially those whose purported belief in Him is dependent on some acorn-beneath-the-cup mentality? And who decides who wins? Not us: God might prefer the honest doubter to the sycophantic chancer.

The Pascalian bet echoes down the centuries, always finding takers. Here is an extreme, action-man version. In June 2006, at the Kiev zoo, a man lowered himself by rope into the island compound where the lions and tigers are kept. As he descended, he shouted across to the gawping crowds. One witness quoted him as saying, “Who believes in God will be unharmed by lions”; another, the more challenging, “God will save me, if He exists.” The metaphysical
provocateur
reached the ground, took off his shoes, and walked towards the animals; whereupon an irritated lioness knocked him down, and bit through his carotid artery. Does this prove a) the man was mad; b) God does not exist; c) God does exist, but won’t be lured into the open by such cheap tricks; d) God does exist, and has just demonstrated that He is an ironist; e) none of the above?

And here is the bet made to sound almost not like a bet: “Go on, believe! It does no harm.” This weak-tea version, the weary murmur of a man with a metaphysical headache, comes from Wittgenstein’s notebooks. If you were the Deity, you might be a little unimpressed by such lukewarm endorsement. But there are times, probably, when “it does no harm”—except for not being true, which some might find irreducible, unnegotiable harm.

As an example: some twenty years before he wrote this note, Wittgenstein worked as a schoolmaster in several remote villages of lower Austria. The locals found him austere and eccentric, yet devoted to his pupils; also willing, despite his own religious doubts, to begin and end each day with the paternoster. While teaching at Trattenbach, Wittgenstein took his pupils on a study trip to Vienna. The nearest station was at Gloggnitz, twelve miles away, so the trip began with a pedagogic hike through the intervening forest, with the children being asked to identify plants and stones they had studied in class. In Vienna, they spent two days doing the same with examples of architecture and technology. Then they took the train back to Gloggnitz. By the time it arrived, night was falling. They set off on their return twelve-mile hike. Wittgenstein, sensing that many of the children were frightened, went from one to the other, saying quietly, “Are you afraid? Well, then, you must think only about God.” They were, quite literally, in a dark wood. Go on, believe! It does no harm. And presumably it didn’t. A nonexistent God will at least protect you from nonexistent elves and sprites and wood demons, even if not from existent wolves and bears (and lionesses).

A Wittgenstein scholar suggests that while the philosopher was not “a religious person,” there was in him “in some sense, the
possibility
of religion”; though his idea of it was less to do with belief in a creator than with a sense of sin and a desire for judgement. He thought that “Life can educate one to a belief in God”—this is one of his last notes. He also imagined himself being asked the question of whether or not he would survive death, and replying that he couldn’t say: not for the reasons you or I might give, but because “I haven’t a clear idea of what I am saying when I’m saying ‘I don’t cease to exist.’” I shouldn’t think many of us do, except for fundamentalist self-immolators expecting very specific rewards. Though what it means, rather than what it might imply, is surely within our grasp.

Chapter 6