Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion (16 page)

4.
If there is a problem with Christianity's approach, it is that it has been
too
successful. The need for comfort has come to be overly identified with a need for Mary herself, instead of being seen for what it really is: an eternal appetite which began long before the
Gospels, originating at the very moment when the first child was picked up by his or her mother and soothed amid the darkness and cold of the first underground cave.

That there is no sympathetic mother or caring father out there who can make everything all right for us is no reason to deny how strongly we wish that there could be. Religion teaches us to be gentle on ourselves in those times of crisis
when, desperate and afraid, we confusedly cry out for help from
someone
– even though we ostensibly don't believe in anything, even though our own mother is long dead, our father was unavailable and cruel and we now occupy a responsible and grown-up place in the world.

The example of Catholicism suggests that art and architecture have a role to play at such times, for it is through looking at images of parental faces turned lovingly towards children, usually in the quiet, darkened recesses of chapels, museums and associated places of veneration, that we sense some primordial need in us being answered and a certain balance restored.

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.

The Marian cult dares to propose to all atheists, even the most hard-headed, that they too remain vulnerable and pre-rational in their hearts, and might learn to help themselves out of certain darker moods through an accommodation with their eternally artless and immature sides.

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.

1.
Christianity has spent much of its history emphasizing the darker side of earthly existence. Yet even within this sombre tradition, the French philosopher
Blaise Pascal stands out for the exceptionally merciless nature of his
pessimism. In his
Pensées
, written between 1658 and 1662, Pascal misses no opportunity to confront his readers with evidence of mankind's resolutely deviant, pitiful and unworthy nature. In seductive classical French, he informs us that happiness is an illusion (‘Anyone who does not see the vanity of the world is very vain himself'), that misery is the norm (‘If our condition were truly happy we should not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it'), that true love is a chimera (‘How hollow and foul is the heart of man'), that we are as thin-skinned as we are vain (‘A trifle consoles us because a trifle upsets us'), that even the strongest among us are rendered helpless by the countless diseases to which we are vulnerable (‘Flies are so mighty that they can paralyse our minds and eat up our bodies'), that all worldly institutions are corrupt (‘Nothing is surer than that people will be weak') and that we are absurdly prone to overestimate our own importance (‘How many kingdoms know nothing of us!'). The very best we may hope to do in these circumstances, he suggests, is to face the desperate facts of our situation head-on: ‘Man's greatness comes from knowing he is wretched.'

Given the tone, it comes as something of a surprise to discover that reading Pascal is not at all the depressing experience one might have presumed. The work is consoling, heartwarming and even, at times, hilarious. For those teetering on the
verge of despair, there can paradoxically be no finer book to turn to than one which seeks to grind man's every last hope into the dust. The
Pensées
, far more than any saccharine volume touting inner beauty, positive thinking or the realization of hidden potential, has the power to coax the suicidal off the ledge of a high parapet.

If Pascal's pessimism can effectively console us, it may be because 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.

We should honour Pascal, and the long line of Christian pessimists to which he belongs, for doing us the incalculably great favour of publicly and elegantly rehearsing the facts of our sinful and pitiful state.

2.
This is not a stance for which the modern world betrays much sympathy, for 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. It has been impossible to hold on to a balanced assessment of what life is likely to provide for us when we have witnessed the cracking of the genetic code, the invention of the mobile phone, the opening of Western-style supermarkets in remote corners of
China and the launch of the Hubble telescope.

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.

3.
Christianity is not, in and of itself, an unhopeful institution. It merely has the good sense to locate its expectations firmly in the next life, in the moral and material perfection of a world far beyond this one.

This relegation of hope to a distant sphere has enabled the Church to be uniquely clear-eyed and unsentimental about earthly reality. It does not assume that politics could ever create perfect justice, that any marriage could be free of conflict or dissent, that money could ever deliver security, that a friend could be unfailingly loyal or, more generally, that Heavenly Jerusalem could be built on ordinary ground. Since its founding, the religion has maintained a usefully sober vision, of a kind that the secular world has been too sentimental and cowardly to embrace, about our chances of improving on the brute facts of our corrupted natures.

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. With no evident awareness of the contradiction they may, in the same breath, gruffly dismiss a belief in angels while sincerely trusting that the combined powers of the IMF, the medical research establishment, Silicon Valley and democratic politics could together cure the ills of mankind.

4.
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. We should cease to view the pessimism of religions as belonging to them alone, or as indelibly dependent on hopes for salvation. We should strive to adopt the acute perspective of those who believe in paradise, even as we live out our own lives abiding by the fundamental atheistic precept that this is the one world we will ever know.

5.
The benefits of a philosophy of neo-religious pessimism are nowhere more apparent than in relation to
marriage, one of modern society's most grief-stricken arrangements, which has been rendered unnecessarily hellish by the astonishing secular supposition that it should be entered into principally for the sake of happiness.

Christian and Jewish marriages, while not always jovial, are at least spared the second order of suffering which arises from the mistaken impression that it is somehow wrong or unjust to be malcontent. Christianity and Judaism present marriage not as a union inspired and governed by subjective enthusiasm but rather, and more modestly, as a mechanism by which individuals can assume an adult position in society and thence, with the help of a close friend, undertake to nurture and educate the next generation under divine guidance. These limited expectations tend to forestall the suspicion, so familiar to secular partners, that there might have been more intense, angelic or less fraught alternatives available elsewhere. Within the religious ideal, friction, disputes and boredom are signs not of error, but of life proceeding according to plan.

Notwithstanding their practical approach, these religions do recognize our desire to adore passionately. They know of our need to believe in others, to worship and serve them and to find in them a perfection which eludes us in ourselves. They simply insist that these objects of adoration should always be divine rather than human. Therefore they assign us eternally youthful, attractive and virtuous deities to shepherd us through life, while reminding us on a daily basis that human beings are comparatively humdrum and flawed creations worthy of forgiveness and patience, a detail which is apt to elude our notice in the heat of marital squabbling. ‘Why can't you be more perfect?' is the incensed question that lurks beneath a majority of secular arguments. In their effort to keep us from hurling our curdled dreams at one another, the faiths have the good sense to provide us with angels to worship and lovers to tolerate.