perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.17
So I could not see that the Gauguin case introduced luck into morality. But there was another conclusion to be drawn altogether.
The Gauguin case showed that there can be key decisions, life-changing, ‘existential’ as we used to call them, that cannot be rational because not all the facts on which a rational decision depends are knowable in advance. Gauguin may have suspected that he had artistic genius, but he could not know until he had taken the risk of dedicating himself totally to art. I may know who and what I am. I cannot know in advance who or what I could become. There are certain risks you have to take, such that only in retrospect can you know whether you were right to take them, and perhaps not even then. Neither Gauguin nor Van Gogh lived to see their genius recognised.
This is not a minor fact about humanity. It lies at the heart of all creative endeavour. Crick and Watson could not know in advance that they would discover DNA when they began to search for it. Columbus could not have known he would discover America before he set sail for it. As Karl Popper said in The Poverty of Historicism, the future cannot be predicted, because how it will happen depends on discoveries that cannot be predicted, because if they could be predicted they would already have been discovered. That is why every attempt to foretell ‘the shape of things to come’ is at best guesswork, and usually bad guesswork.
What Gauguin had was faith: faith in himself, in his art, in his vocation. Externally, his fate may seem like luck: so Williams argued. But to Gauguin himself, luck was the last thing he had in mind. Does anyone engaged in scientific research, or writing a novel, or starting a new business, or getting married, believe in luck? Hardly. If luck were what governed the universe, we would all be Stoics or Epicureans, guarding ourselves against outrageous fortune by avoiding worst-case scenarios and minimising risks. Luck is precisely the wrong concept to invoke if we seek to understand those who take great risks in a cause to which they feel themselves called.
What they have is faith: faith that effort is rewarded, that dedication is worthwhile, that there is no creativity without risk and no risk without occasional failure. Faith is not a spurious knowledge of things we might be able to demonstrate through scientific means. Nor is it belief in the irrefutable, always insulated against the possibility of being proved wrong. Faith is the human response to the phenomenon that defines the human condition: the constitutive uncertainty of our lives as we walk towards the undiscovered country called the future.
We know much, but there is one thing we can never know: what tomorrow may bring. Faith is what allows us to face the future without fear: ‘Though I walk through the shadow of death I will fear no evil for you are with me.’ That was the faith that moved Abraham and Sarah to leave their land, their birthplace and their father’s house, to travel to an unknown destination in response to a divine call. It moved Moses to abandon life as an Egyptian prince or a Midianite shepherd, to lead his people to freedom. Faith is what moves people to great achievement that defies probability and predictability.
Faith is not certainty. It is the courage to live with uncertainty. Faith is never easy. The great heroes of the moral life, like the great artists and scientists and thinkers, like anyone who has undertaken to live a life of high ideals, know failure after failure, disappointment after disappointment. What made them great is that they refused to despair. Like Jacob wrestling with the angel, they said to fate, ‘I will not let you go until you bless me’ (Genesis 32:26). Judaism is built on that faith. Jews refused to let go of God, and God refused to let go of them. They wrestle still. So do all who have faith.
Science is about explanation. Religion is about meaning. To find meaning in life, as Viktor Frankl discovered in Auschwitz, is to hear a call. ‘In the last resort, man should not ask, “What is the meaning of my life?” but should realise that he himself is being questioned.’18 God is calling each of us to a task – asking each of us as he asked the first humans, ‘Where are you?’ – but to hear the call we have to learn to listen. We can never be sure that we heard correctly. We can never know that it really was the voice of God, which is why humility not arrogance, and risk not certainty, are the deepest marks of faith. Nor can we be sure in advance that the journey we take will lead to the destination we seek. That – the Gauguin problem – is why we need faith. I owe that discovery to my teacher, Bernard Williams, perhaps the greatest atheist of our time.
Everything I have learned about faith in a lifetime tells me that the science of creation – cosmology – wondrous though it is, takes second place to the sheer wonder that God could take this risk of creating a creature with the freedom to disobey him and wreck his world. There is no faith humans can have in God equal to the faith God must have had in humankind to place us here as guardians of the vastness and splendour of the universe. We exist because of God’s faith in us. That is why I see in the faces of those I meet a trace of God’s love that lifts me to try to love a little as God loves. I know of nothing with greater power to lift us beyond ourselves and to perform acts that carry within them a signal of transcendence. God lives wherever we open our eyes to his radiance, our hearts to his transforming love.
PART TWO
Why It Matters
5
What We Stand to Lose
The absence of God, when consistently upheld and thoroughly examined, spells the ruin of man in the sense that it demolishes or robs of meaning everything we have been used to think of as the essence of being human: the quest for truth, the distinction of good and evil, the claim to dignity, the claim to creating something that withstands the indifferent destructiveness of time.
Leszek Kolakowski1
When I was a student, a friend of mine, an Orthodox Jew who had lost his faith, decided to conduct a scientific experiment to prove, once and for all, whether God existed or not. He waited until the Sabbath, when Jews are forbidden to switch electricity on or off, and then, in his room, switched on the light. God – somewhat to his relief – did not strike him down. Nothing happened except that the light went on. He had proved to his satisfaction that God did not exist.
Now that he has returned to his faith, he has worked out that things are not quite that simple. When you stop believing in God, there is no sudden explosion of light or darkness. The world continues on its accustomed course. The sky does not fall. The sun still shines. Life goes on. But something is lost nonetheless, something important that gives life connectedness, depth and a sense of purpose; that gives you a feeling of participating in something vast and consequential.
When we lose God, what else do we lose? What do we lose collectively and individually? That is the question I pose in the chapters that follow.
The loss is not immediately obvious, but our human worth is subtly undermined. Politicians value us for how we vote, economists for how we earn, advertisers for how we buy, people in the arts and entertainment for how we spend our leisure. Outside religion there is no secure alternative base for the unconditional source of worth that in the West has come from the idea that we are each in God’s image. Though many have tried to create a secular substitute, none has ultimately succeeded.2 None has stood firm under pressure. That has been demonstrated four times in the modern world when an attempt was made to create a social order on secular lines: the French Revolution, Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany and Communist China. When there is a bonfire of the sanctities, lives are lost.
We are unlikely to go down that road for the foreseeable future, but civilisations can end not with a bang but with a whimper. They can die so slowly that very few notice they are dying. When religious faith goes, five things happen, gradually and imperceptibly. First there is a loss of belief in human dignity and the sanctity of life. This is not immediately obvious, because the new order announces itself as an enhancement of human dignity. It values autonomy, choice and individual rights. It creat
es a culture of individualism. So, at first, human dignity seems to do better in a secular culture than in a religious one.
But eventually people discover that in the new social order they are more vulnerable and alone. Marriages break up. Communities grow old and weak. People lack deep, stable structures of support. They become members of the lonely crowd or the electronic herd. They float on a tide of fashion. They dress in strangely uniform ways. They think in strangely uniform ways. It takes far more courage to defy the consensus than it used to when conscience was given dignity by faith. Wherever you look, in the arts, in music, in poetry, in the way people spend their free time, life seems more superficial than it once did. It has become a play of surfaces. Ultimately, life itself becomes disposable, in the form of abortion and euthanasia. That is often the first warning signal.
The second sign is the loss of the politics of covenant, the idea that society is a place where we undertake collective responsibility for the common good. Citizenship in such a society has a moral dimension. It involves loyalty and the willingness to sacrifice for the sake of others. The politics of covenant has deep religious roots, although they are almost never visible on the surface. When those roots are lost, in its place comes the politics of contract, in which the state becomes a supplier of services in return for taxes, and political parties vie on the basis of offering either a better service or a lower cost. People become cynical about politicians and increasingly care less about politics and more about private life. Society dissolves into a series of pressure groups and no longer deeply enters our identity. Being British or French or Italian comes to seem more like where you are than who you are.
The third sign is a loss of morality. This does not mean that people become immoral. Some people do that, whether they are religious or secular; most do not, whether they are religious or secular. I do not believe that you need to be religious to be moral: I take that as a slander against humanity. What happens, though, is that words that once meant a great deal begin to lose their force – words like duty, obligation, honour, integrity, loyalty and trust. If you can do it and get rewarded for it and other people do it anyway, you will be regarded as odd if you do not on the grounds that it is dishonourable or would betray a trust or ‘that’s not how decent people behave’. People may respect you, but they will think you an odd survival of an earlier age.
The fourth sign is the loss of marriage. Relationships in a secular society are no longer consecrated. They become multiple forms of friendship, that can break and reconfigure without too much emotional distress. The idea of marriage as a commitment, a loyalty at the deepest level of our being, becomes ever harder to sustain. So fewer people marry, more marriages end in divorce, fewer people – men especially – have a lifelong connection with their children, and the bonds across the generations grow thin. Compare all those sonnets about love from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries with the lyrics of a contemporary pop song about sex, and a certain difference may strike you. Those who live in the world of the latter may well find it difficult to understand what those earlier writers were talking about.
The fifth is the possibility of a meaningful life. By this I do not mean life as a personal project. That is available to us in today’s secular culture. I mean life with a meaning that comes from outside us, as a call, a vocation, a mission. To be sure, you can be completely secular and still feel a sense of vocation – to teach, to heal, to fight injustice or poverty. But there is some kind of transcendence functioning here, because life as such does not call. The universe is silent. Nature is dumb. Life makes no demands of us. The concept of ‘being called’ is one of the last relics of religious memory within a secular culture. A totally secular order would not have space for it or find it meaningful.
As I wrote in the Introduction, I do not mean any of this in an absolute either/or sense. There are people who are completely secular and live happy and purposeful lives. More than that: they often live altruistic and heroic lives. Human goodness is widely distributed, and I have no respect for religious people who cannot see this. There are also religious people who live miserable and guilt-haunted lives. There are secular societies, many of them, in which there is far greater freedom than in religious societies. In fact, our image of a religious society in the twenty-first century is of a repressive, rights-denying, even brutal regime, and I have nothing to say in defence of such societies. They break the rule of Abrahamic faith, set out in chapter 13, that religion should never wield power. Religion, as I explain it there, is a principled opposition to the will to power. Faith is about the forms of gracious coexistence that abjure the use of power.
We need some kind of balance: a public space in which we are each accorded equal respect regardless of our beliefs or lack of them, and a variegated but vigorous civil society where we associate in families, congregations, communities, neighbourhoods and schools, often though not always held together by religious bonds, places where we feel the radiance of the divine presence blessing our life together and connecting us across time and space to our several larger, extended families of faith. These are the places where meaning is made, where we discover the sacred space where self and other meet in divine embrace.
It took the West a long time to develop this balance, but we are in danger of forgetting what happens, not immediately but in the long run, when we lose it.
Friedrich Nietzsche was the most honest atheist of modern times. He was one of the very few who truly understood how momentous an event it would be for European civilisation to lose the spiritual foundation on which it had been built since the conversion of Emperor Constantine in 312. In the famous passage in which, in The Gay Science, he has a madman first pronounce the words ‘God is dead’, he expresses real terror:
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?3
There is an unmistakable echo of Macbeth in these lines and, like Lady Macbeth, Nietzsche eventually went mad, spending the last eleven years of his life clinically insane. Nietzsche published The Gay Science in 1882, by which time he knew that many significant intellectuals had lost their faith: in Britain they included George Eliot and Matthew Arnold as well as the man who greatly influenced his thought, though he was reluctant to admit it – Charles Darwin.4
Nietzsche thought that the British completely failed to understand the gravity of what was happening. He singled out George Eliot, whom he called an ‘English shallowpate’, for failing to realise that if you lose Christian faith, you will inevitably lose Christian morality. ‘If one breaks out of it a fundamental idea, the belief in God, one thereby breaks the whole thing to pieces: one has nothing of any consequence left in one’s hands.’5 Europe, Nietzsche believed, would have no real choice but to go back to the Greek-Dionysian ethic he espoused, namely the will to power.
Nietzsche was not a minor figure in the history of European thought. He was by far the most prophetic moralist, or anti-moralist, of modern times. My doctoral supervisor Bernard Williams admired him greatly and said he wished he could quote him every twenty minutes. No one saw more clearly the consequences of abandoning Christian ethics, and Nietzsche unhesitatingly drew the Darwinian conclusion. The strong must eliminate the weak. The Christian principle of caring for the weak was against nature and against the logic of power. The Christian idea of the universal love of humanity means, in practice, ‘the preference for the suffering, underprivileged, degenerate: it has in fact lowered and weakened the strength, the responsibility, the lofty duty to sacrifice men’.6
There is a terrifying passage in The Will to Power, written in 1888:
The biblical prohi
bition ‘thou shalt not kill’ is a piece of naiveté compared with the seriousness of the prohibition of life to decadents: ‘thou shalt not procreate’. – Life itself recognizes no solidarity, no ‘equal rights’, between the healthy and the degenerate parts of an organism: one must excise the latter – or the whole will perish. – Sympathy for decadents, equal rights for the ill-constituted – that would be the profoundest immorality, that would be antinature itself as morality!7
Once the Christian conscience was eliminated, human beings would be forced to become brutal, ruthless, hard; impose their will on others; eliminate the handicapped and those deemed subhuman; and give full reign to the violence that Christian compassion had emasculated for so long.
Nietzsche had a premonition that some vast tragedy was going to play itself out in Germany once the full consequence of the death of Christianity had been absorbed. He wrote, ‘One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous – a crisis without equal on Earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.’8
Had he been entirely alone in this judgement, one might have said this was madness, despite the fact that it actually happened and that the most objectionable passages in Nietzsche’s writings also turned out to be the most prophetic. But one other genius, the poet Heinrich Heine, saw the same thing in 1843, forty-five years before Nietzsche, in one of the most prescient pieces ever written:
A drama will be enacted in Germany compared to which the French Revolution will seem like a harmless idyll. Christianity restrained the martial ardor of the Germans for a time but it did not destroy it; once the restraining talisman is shattered, savagery will rise again … the mad fury of the berserk, of which Nordic poets sing and speak … The old stony gods will rise from the rubble and rub the thousand-year-old dust from their eyes. Thor with the giant hammer will come forth and smash the gothic domes.
The Great Partnership Page 11