Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion (20 page)

The most famous of all Catholic cycles of suffering is the Fourteen
Stations of the Cross, whose elements illustrate the tragic final chapter of Jesus's life, beginning with the Condemnation and ending with the Laying in the Tomb. Hung in order around the niches or columns of a church, the Stations are meant to be toured in an anticlockwise itinerary, with each stage throwing light on a different aspect of agony.

While Jesus's end may have been exceptionally barbarous, the strategy of organizing a cycle of representative images of difficulty, of enriching these with commentaries and hanging them in an ambulatory circuit around a contemplative space could be as effective in the lay as in the Christian realm. By its very nature, life inflicts on us universal pains based on timeless psychological and social realities; we all wrestle with the dilemmas of childhood, education, family, work, love, ageing and death – many of which now bear semi-official labels (‘adolescent angst', ‘postpartum depression', ‘midlife crisis'). New secular cycles of representative sorrows could anchor themselves around these stages and so articulate the true nature of their camouflaged dimensions. They could teach us lessons about the real course of life in the safety and quiet of a gallery, before events themselves found a way of doing the same with their characteristic violence and surprise.

5.
Christian art understands that images are important partly because they can generate
compassion, the fragile quality which enables the boundaries of our egos to dissolve, helps us to recognize ourselves in the experiences of strangers and can make their pain matter to us as much as our own.

Art has a role to play in this manoeuvre of the mind upon which, not coincidentally, civilization itself is founded, because the unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of
forgiveness.

As if to reinforce the idea that to be human is, above all else, to partake in a common vulnerability to misfortune, disease and violence, Christian art returns us relentlessly to the flesh, whether in the form of the infant Jesus's plump cheeks or of the taut, broken skin over his ribcage in his final hours. The message is clear: even if we do not bleed to death on a cross, simply by virtue of being human we will each of us suffer our share of agony and indignity, each face appalling, intractable realities which may nevertheless kindle in us feelings of mutuality. Christianity hints that if our bodies were immune to pain or decay, we would be monsters.

Picturing others as children can prompt similar moments of identification. It is no coincidence that, next to scenes of the Crucifixion, Jesus's babyhood is the most frequent theme in Christian art, his infant innocence and sweetness contrasting poignantly with the way we know his story will end. Images of Jesus sleeping in his mother's arms subliminally reinforce his counsel that we should learn to regard all our fellow human beings as if they were children. Our enemies too were once infants, in need of attention (rather than bad), fifty centimetres long, breathing softly on their stomachs, smelling of milk and talcum powder.

Though our destructive powers increase with age, though we shed the ability to elicit others' sympathy even as we acquire a greater store of things to be pitied for, we always retain some of the artlessness and lack of guile with which we began. In recounting one man's journey from the manger to the cross, Christianity tells a quasi-universal story about the fate of innocence and gentleness in a turbulent world. We are most of us lambs in need of good shepherds and a merciful flock.

6.
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.

The possibility of responding compassionately to others is crucially linked to our angle of vision. According to our
perspective, we may see either a self-righteous husband lecturing his wife or two wounded and humiliated individuals equally unable properly to articulate their distress; a proud battalion of soldiers in a village street or a frightened girl hiding from invaders in a doorway; an old man walking home with a bag of groceries or a former gold medallist in free-style swimming transformed into a stooped, sallow figure unrecognizable even to himself.

Looking at a photograph by
Helen Levitt of four boys in a New York street, we are likely to find ourselves longing to comfort the grim-faced, stoic young man in the corner, whose mother perhaps only half an hour ago did up the many buttons of his handsome coat, and whose distressed expression evokes a pure form of agony. But how very different the same scene would have looked from just a metre away and another viewpoint. To the boy at the far right, what appears to matter most is a chance to take a closer look at his friend's toy. He has already lost any interest in the overdressed crybaby by the wall, whom he and his classmates have just slapped hard for a bit of fun, on this day as on most others.

Similarly, a compassionate response to Mantegna's hilltop panorama depends on how we are guided to look at Calvary. The sunny early afternoon, with its wispy clouds floating across a pale blue horizon, might have seemed exceptionally pleasant and trouble-free to the soldier walking home with his pike resting on his shoulder, and looking forward to a supper of an omelette or a chicken leg. Gazing at the valley before him, with its vineyards and rivers, he would hardly have registered the usual moans emanating from the low-lifes up on the crosses. For his fellow soldiers seated on the ground, meanwhile, the most pressing question on the day of the death of the son of God might have been who was going to win five denarii in the game they were playing on the face of a shield.