Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion (18 page)

Religion is more acute than philosophy in understanding that it is not enough merely to sketch out such ideas in books. It would of course be ideal if we could – faithful and faithless alike – view things
sub specie aeternitatis
at all times, but we are almost certain to fall out of the habit unless we are firmly and consistently reminded to do so.

Among the cannier initiatives of religion, then, has been the provision of regular souvenirs of the transcendent, at morning prayer and the weekly service, at the harvest festival and the baptism, on Yom Kippur and on Palm Sunday. The secular world is lacking an equivalent cycle of moments during which we too might be prodded to imaginatively step out of the earthly city and recalibrate our lives according to a larger and more cosmic set of measurements.

If such a process of re-evaluation offers any common point of access open to both atheists and believers, it may be via an element in nature which is mentioned in both the
Book of Job and Spinoza's
Ethics
: the
stars. It is through their contemplation that the secular are afforded the best chance of experiencing redemptive feelings of awe.

Myopically, the scientific authorities who are officially in charge of interpreting the stars for the rest of us seem rarely to recognize the therapeutic import of their subject matter. In austere scientific language, the space agencies inform us of the properties and paths of the heavenly bodies, yet they seldom consider
astronomy as either a source of wisdom or a plausible corrective to suffering.

Science should matter to us not only because it helps us to control parts of the world, but also because it shows us things that we will
never
master. Thus we would do well to meditate daily, rather as the religious do on their God, on the 9.5 trillion kilometres which comprise a single light year, or perhaps on the luminosity of the largest known star in our galaxy, Eta Carinae, 7,500 light years distant, 400 times the size of the sun and 4 million times as bright. We should punctuate our calendars with celebrations in honour of VY Canis Majoris, a red hypergiant in the constellation Canis Major, 5,000 light years from earth and 2,100 times bigger than our sun. Nightly – perhaps after the main news bulletin and before the celebrity quiz – we might observe a moment of silence in order to contemplate the 200 to 400 billion stars in our galaxy, the 100 billion galaxies and the 3 septillion stars in the universe. Whatever their value may be to science, the stars are in the end no less valuable to mankind as solutions to our megalomania, self-pity and anxiety.

To answer our need to be repeatedly connected through our senses to ideas of transcendence, we should insist that a percentage of all prominently positioned television screens on public view be hooked up to live feeds from the transponders of our extraplanetary
telescopes.

We would then be able to ensure that our frustrations, our broken hearts, our hatred of those who haven't called us and our regrets over opportunities that have passed us by would continuously be rubbed up against, and salved by, images
of galaxies such as Messier 101, a spiral structure which sits towards the bottom left corner of the constellation Ursa Major, 23 million light years away, majestically unaware of everything we are and consolingly unaffected by all that tears us apart.

1.
For some atheists, one of the most difficult aspects of renouncing religion is having to give up on ecclesiastical art and all the beauty and emotion therein. However, to voice regret over this in the presence of many non-believers is to run the risk of being rebuked for sentimental nostalgia and then, perhaps, brusquely reminded that secular societies have in any case developed their own, highly effective means of satisfying the artistic appetites once fed by the faiths.

These non-believers are likely to point out that even where we no longer put up churches, we are still drawn to construct grand buildings that celebrate our visual ideals. The best architects vie for the chance to design these structures; they dominate our cities; they attract pilgrims from all over the world and our voices instinctively drop to a whisper the moment we enter their awe-inspiring galleries. Hence the analogy so often drawn: our museums of art have become our new churches.

The argument has an immediate and seductive plausibility to it. The similarities seem incontrovertible. Like churches, museums enjoy an unparalleled status: they are where we might take a group of visiting aliens to show them what we most delight in and revere. Like churches, they are also the institutions to which the wealthy most readily donate their surplus capital – in the hope of cleansing themselves of whatever sins they may have racked up in the course of accumulating it. Moreover, time spent in museums seems to confer some of the same psychological benefits as attendance at church services; we experience comparable feelings of communing with
something greater than ourselves and of being separated from the compromised and profane world beyond. We may even get a little bored sometimes, as we would in churches, but we emerge with a sense that we have, in a variety of indeterminate ways, become slightly better people.

Like
universities, museums promise to fill the gaps left by the ebbing of faith; they too stand to give us meaning without superstition. Just as secular books hold out a hope that they can replace the
Gospels, so museums may be able to take over the aesthetic responsibilities of churches.

2.
However beguiling this thesis sounds, it suffers from some of the same flaws that bedevil the corresponding argument about the teaching of culture within universities. Museums may in theory be well equipped to satisfy needs formerly catered to by religion, but, rather like universities, in practice they abdicate much of their potential through the way they handle the precious material entrusted to them. While exposing us to objects of genuine importance, they nevertheless seem incapable of adequately linking these to the needs of our souls. We are too often looking at the right pictures through the wrong frames. Yet if there is cause for optimism, it relates to another similarity between museums and universities: both institutions are open to having some of their more uncertain assumptions illuminated through the insights of religion.

The fundamental question which the modern museum has unusual but telling difficulty in answering is why art should matter.
It vociferously insists on art's significance and rallies governments, donors and visitors accordingly. But it subsequently retreats into a curious, institutional silence about what this importance might actually be based on. We are left feeling as though we must have missed out on crucial stages of an argument which the museum has in reality never made, beyond trailing a tautological contention that art should matter to us because it is so important.

As a result, we tend to enter galleries with grave, though by necessity discreet, doubts about what we are meant to do in them. What we must of course never do is treat works of art
religiously
, especially if (as is often the case) they happen to be religious in origin. The modern museum is no place for visitors to get on their knees before once-sacred objects, weep and beg for reassurance and guidance. In many countries museums were explicitly founded as new, secular environments in which religious art could (in contravention of the wishes of its makers) be seen stripped of its theological context. It was no coincidence that during the period of revolutionary government in France in 1792, only three days separated the declaration of the state's official severance from the Catholic Church and the inauguration of the Palais du Louvre as the country's first national museum. The Louvre's galleries were quickly filled with items looted from French Catholic churches, and subsequently, thanks to Napoleon's campaigns, from monasteries and chapels across Europe.

What we can no longer pray to, we are now generally invited to garner facts about. Being an art ‘expert' is associated primarily with knowing a great deal: about where a work was made, who paid for it, where its artist's parents came from and what his or her artistic influences may have been.

In a cabinet in one of the medieval galleries of the Louvre we find a statuette identified as
Virgin and Child
, stolen from the Abbey of Saint-Denis in 1789. For centuries before its relegation to the museum, people regularly knelt before it and drew strength from Mary's compassion and serenity. However, to judge by its caption and catalogue entry, in the view of the modern Louvre, what we really need to do with it is
understand
it – understand that it is made of gilded silver, that in her free hand Mary holds a crystal fleur-de-lis, that the piece is typical of Parisian metalwork fabricated in the first half of the fourteenth century, that the figure's overall shape derives from that of a Byzantine model called the Virgin of Tenderness and that this is the earliest dated French example of the translucent
basse-taille
enamelwork first developed by Tuscan craftsmen in the late thirteenth century.

Unfortunately, when it is presented to us principally as a storehouse of concrete information, art soon starts to lose its interest for all but a determined few. A measure of this indifference emerges from a series of images by the German photographer
Thomas Struth which shows us tourists making their way around some of the world's great museums. Patently unable to draw much sustenance from their surroundings, they stand bemused in front of Annunciations and Crucifixions, dutifully consulting their catalogues, perhaps taking in the date of a work or an artist's name, while before them a line of crimson blood trickles down the muscular leg of the son of God or a dove hovers in a cerulean sky. They appear to want to be transformed by art, but the lightning bolts they are waiting for seem never to strike. They resemble the disappointed participants in a failed seance.