Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion (19 page)

The puzzlement shared by museum-goers only increases when we turn to the art of our own era. We look at a giant neon version of the alphabet. We take in a vat of gelatinous water in which a sheet of aluminium fixed to a motor is swaying back and forth to the amplified sound of a human heartbeat. We watch a grainy film of an elderly woman slicing an apple, intercut with footage of a lion running across a savannah. And we think to ourselves that only an idiot or a reactionary would dare to ask what all this could mean. The only certainty is that neither the artist nor the museum is going to help us: wall texts are kept to a minimum; catalogues are enigmatically written. It would take a brave soul to raise a hand.

3.
Christianity, by contrast, never leaves us in any doubt about what art is for: it is a medium to remind us about what matters. It exists to guide us to what we should worship and revile if we wish to be sane, good people in possession of well-ordered souls. It is a mechanism whereby our memories are forcibly jogged about what we have to love and to be grateful for, as well as what we should draw away from and be afraid of.

The German philosopher Hegel defined art as ‘the sensuous presentation of ideas'. It is, he indicated, in the business of conveying concepts, just like ordinary language, except that it engages us through both our senses
and
our reason, and is uniquely effective for its dual modes of address.

To return to one of the familiar themes of this book, we need art because we are so forgetful. We are creatures of the body as well as of the mind, and so require art to stir our languid imaginations and motivate us in ways that mere philosophical expositions cannot. Many of our most important ideas get flattened and overlooked in everyday life, their truth rubbed off through casual use. We know intellectually that we should be kind and forgiving and empathetic, but such adjectives have a tendency to lose all their meaning until we meet with a work of art that grabs us through our senses and won't let us go until we have properly remembered why these qualities matter and how badly society needs them for its balance and its sanity. Even the word
love
has a habit of growing sterile and banal in the abstract, until the moment when we glimpse a contemporary photograph of two grandparents patiently feeding their grandchildren an apple purée for supper, or a fifteenth-century rendering of Mary and her son at nap-time – and remember why love lies at the core of our humanity.

We might modify Hegel's definition to bring it more fully into line with Christianity's insights: good art is the sensuous presentation of those ideas which matter most to the proper functioning of our souls – and yet which we are most inclined to forget, even though they are the basis for our capacity for contentment and virtue.

Christianity was never troubled by the notion of charging art with an educative, therapeutic mission. Its own art willingly aspired to the status of
propaganda. Although the noun has become one of the more frightening in our lexicon, coloured by the sinister ends towards which certain historical regimes have put it to work, propaganda is a neutral concept in its essence, suggesting merely influence rather than any particular direction for it. We may associate propaganda with corruption and tasteless posters, but Christianity took it to be synonymous with the artistic enhancement of our receptivity to such qualities as modesty, friendship and courage.

From the fourteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, a brotherhood in Rome was renowned for tracking down prisoners on their way to the gallows and placing before their eyes
tavolette
, or small boards bearing images from the Christian story – usually of Christ on the Cross or the Virgin and Child – in the hope that these representations would bring the condemned solace in their final minutes. It is difficult to conceive of a more extreme example of a belief in the redemptive capacity of images, and yet the brotherhood was only carrying out a mission to which Christian art has always been committed: that of putting examples of the most important ideas in front of us at difficult moments, to help us to live and to die.

4.
Among these important ideas, none has been more significant to Christianity than the notion of
suffering. We are all, in the religion's eyes, inherently vulnerable beings who will not get through life without meeting with atrocious griefs of mind and body. Christianity also knows that any pain is aggravated by a sense that we are alone in experiencing it. However, we are as a rule not very skilled at communicating the texture of our troubles to others, or at sensing the sorrows they themselves are hiding behind stoic façades. We are therefore in need of art to help us to understand our own neglected hurt, to grasp everything that does not come up in casual conversation and to coax us out of an unproductively isolated relationship with our most despised and awkward qualities.

For a thousand years and more, Christian artists have been directing their energies towards making us feel what it would be like to have large, rusty nails hammered into our palms, to bleed from weeping wounds in our sides and to climb a steep hill on legs already broken by the weight of the cross we are carrying. The depiction of such pain is not meant to be ghoulish; rather, it is intended to be a route to moral and psychological development, a way to increase our feelings of solidarity as well as our capacities for
compassion.

In the spring of 1512, Matthias Grünewald began work on an altarpiece for the Monastery of St Anthony in Isenheim, in north-eastern France. The monks of this order specialized in tending to the sick, and most particularly to those afflicted with ergotism, or St Anthony's fire, a usually fatal disease which causes seizures, hallucinations and gangrene. Once the work was ready, it became customary for patients, on their arrival at the monastery, to be taken to the chapel to see it, so that
they might understand that in the suffering they were now enduring, they had once been equalled, and perhaps exceeded, by God's own son.

It is fundamental to the power of the Christian story that Jesus died in more or less the greatest agony ever experienced by anyone. He thus offers all human beings, however racked by illness and grief, evidence that they are not alone in their condition – sparing them, if not suffering itself, then at least the defeated feeling that they have been singled out for unusual punishment.

Jesus's story is a register of pain – betrayal, loneliness, self-doubt, torture – through which our own anguish can be mirrored and contextualized, and our impressions of its rarity corrected. Such impressions are of course not hard to form, given how vigorously society waves away our difficulties and surrounds us with sentimental commercial images which menace us by seeming so far removed from our reality in their promises.

Christianity recognizes the capacity of the best art to give shape to pain and thereby to attenuate the worst of our feelings of paranoia and isolation. Catholic artists have long been in the habit of producing cycles of paintings known as the
Seven Sorrows of Mary, renderings of the most painful episodes in the life of the Virgin, from the prophecy of Simeon to Jesus's death and burial. Tradition dictates that the faithful should meditate on these works and endeavour through them to better understand not only Mary's trials but also those endured by mothers more generally. The underlying intention of these Marian cycles, although they were defined by the particularities of Catholicism, could nevertheless be a source of inspiration for atheists. We might consider setting contemporary artists the task of depicting a Seven Sorrows of Parenthood, a Twelve Sorrows of Adolescence or a Twenty-one Sorrows of Divorce.