Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion (11 page)

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 serious 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.

ii. How We Are Taught

1.
Rearranging university education according to the insights gained from religion would entail adjusting not only the curriculum but also, just as crucially, the way it is taught.

In its methods, Christianity has from its beginnings been guided by a simple yet essential observation that has nevertheless never made any impression upon those in charge of secular education: how very easily we forget things.

Its theologians have known that our soul suffers from what ancient Greek philosophers termed
akrasia
, a perplexing tendency to know what we should do combined with a persistent reluctance actually to do it, whether through weakness of will or absent-mindedness. 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. It follows the Greek
sophists in insisting that all lessons should appeal to both reason (
logos
) and emotion (
pathos
), as well as endorsing
Cicero's advice that public speakers should have a threefold ability to prove (
probare
), delight (
delectare
) and persuade (
flectere
). There is no justification for delivering world-shaking ideas in a mumble.

2.
However, defenders of secular university education have seldom worried about
akrasia
. They implicitly maintain that people will be properly affected by concepts even when they hear about them only once or twice, at the age of twenty, before a fifty-year career in finance or market research, via a lecturer standing in a bare room speaking in a monotone. According to this view, ideas may fall out of the mind in much the same random order as the contents of an upturned handbag, or may be expressed with all the graceless banality of an instruction manual, without threatening the overall purpose of intellectual endeavour. 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.

It seems beyond imagining that any contemporary university lecturer would, upon his death, have his body strapped to a table, his neck cut open and his larynx, tongue and lower jaw removed, to be mounted in a golden case encrusted with jewels and displayed in a niche at the centre of a shrine dedicated to the memory of his oratorical gifts. Yet this was precisely the fate of Anthony of Padua, the thirteenth-century Franciscan friar who acceded to sainthood by virtue of his exceptional talent and stamina for public speaking, and whose vocal apparatus, on view in the basilica of his hometown, still draws admiring pilgrims from all corners of Christendom. According to holy legend, Anthony delivered 10,000
sermons over his lifetime and was able to melt the hearts of the most determined sinners. It was even said that one day in Rimini, standing on the seashore, he began to declaim to no one in particular and soon found himself surrounded by an audience of curious and evidently appreciative fish.

3.
St Anthony was but one exemplar in a long and self-conscious tradition of Christian oratory. The preaching of
John Donne, the Jacobean poet and dean of St Paul's Cathedral, was comparably persuasive, treating complex ideas with an impression of effortless lucidity. Forestalling the possibility of boredom during his sermons, Donne would pause every few paragraphs to sum up his thoughts in phrases designed to engrave themselves on his listeners' skittish minds (‘Age is a sicknesse, and youth is an ambush'). Like all compelling aphorists, he had a keen command of binary oppositions (‘If you take away due fear, you take away true love'), in his case married to a lyrical sensibility which enabled him to soar along contrails of rare adjectives before bringing his congregation up short with a maxim of homespun simplicity (‘Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee'). He situated himself vis-à-vis his audience without any hint of schoolmasterly pedantry. They could feel the truth of his ideas all the more intensely for it being delivered by someone who appeared to be appealingly human and flawed (‘I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in, and invite God, and his Angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his Angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door').

More recently, the Christian oratorical tradition has been further developed by African-American preachers, particularly those of the Pentecostal and Baptist denominations. In churches across the
United States, a Sunday sermon is not an occasion to sit with one eye trained on the clock while, from a lectern in the apse, a cleric impassively dissects the story of the Good Samaritan. Instead, believers are expected to open their hearts, clasp the hands of their neighbours, erupt into shouts of ‘All right now' and ‘Amen, preacher', let the Holy Spirit enter their souls and finally collapse in paroxysms of ecstatic wailing. Up on the stage, the preacher stokes the fires of his congregation's enthusiasm through call-and-response, asking repeatedly, in a mesmerizing blend of vernacular expression and the vocabulary of the King James Bible, ‘Will you say Amen? I say will you
say
Amen?'