Religion for Atheists

by Alain De Botton

  Few would fall asleep. (illustration credit 4.8)

  ii. How We Are Taught

  1.

  Rearranging university education according to the insights gained from religion would entail adjusting not only the curriculum but also, just as crucially, the way it is taught.

  In its methods, Christianity has from its beginnings been guided by a simple yet essential observation that has nevertheless never made any impression upon those in charge of secular education: how very easily we forget things.

  Its theologians have known that our soul suffers from what ancient Greek philosophers termed akrasia, a perplexing tendency to know what we should do combined with a persistent reluctance actually to do it, whether through weakness of will or absent-mindedness. We all possess wisdom that we lack the strength properly to enact in our lives. Christianity pictures the mind as a sluggish and fickle organ, easy enough to impress but forever inclined to change its focus and cast its commitments aside. Consequently, the religion proposes that the central issue for education is not so much how to counteract ignorance — as secular educators imply — as how we can combat our reluctance to act upon ideas which we have already fully understood at a theoretical level. It follows the Greek sophists in insisting that all lessons should appeal to both reason (logos) and emotion (pathos), as well as endorsing Cicero’s advice that public speakers should have a threefold ability to prove (probare), delight (delectare) and persuade (flectere). There is no justification for delivering world-shaking ideas in a mumble.

  2.

  However, defenders of secular university education have seldom worried about akrasia. They implicitly maintain that people will be properly affected by concepts even when they hear about them only once or twice, at the age of twenty, before a fifty-year career in finance or market research, via a lecturer standing in a bare room speaking in a monotone. According to this view, ideas may fall out of the mind in much the same random order as the contents of an upturned handbag, or may be expressed with all the graceless banality of an instruction manual, without threatening the overall purpose of intellectual endeavour. Ever since Plato attacked the Greek sophists for being more concerned with speaking well than thinking honestly, Western intellectuals have been intransigently suspicious of eloquence, whether spoken or written, believing that the fluent pedagogue could unfairly disguise unacceptable or barren notions with honeyed words. The way an idea is imparted has been deemed to be of little importance next to the quality of the idea itself. The modern university has thus placed no premium on a talent for oratory, priding itself on its interest in the truth rather than in techniques to ensure its successful and enduring conveyance.

  It seems beyond imagining that any contemporary university lecturer would, upon his death, have his body strapped to a table, his neck cut open and his larynx, tongue and lower jaw removed, to be mounted in a golden case encrusted with jewels and displayed in a niche at the centre of a shrine dedicated to the memory of his oratorical gifts. Yet this was precisely the fate of Anthony of Padua, the thirteenth-century Franciscan friar who acceded to sainthood by virtue of his exceptional talent and stamina for public speaking, and whose vocal apparatus, on view in the basilica of his hometown, still draws admiring pilgrims from all corners of Christendom. According to holy legend, Anthony delivered 10,000 sermons over his lifetime and was able to melt the hearts of the most determined sinners. It was even said that one day in Rimini, standing on the seashore, he began to declaim to no one in particular and soon found himself surrounded by an audience of curious and evidently appreciative fish.

  This rarely happens to our university lecturers: the enshrined lower jaw of St Anthony of Padua: reliquary, basilica of St Anthony, Padua, c. 1350. (illustration credit 4.9)

  3.

  St Anthony was but one exemplar in a long and self-conscious tradition of Christian oratory. The preaching of John Donne, the Jacobean poet and dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, was comparably persuasive, treating complex ideas with an impression of effortless lucidity. Forestalling the possibility of boredom during his sermons, Donne would pause every few paragraphs to sum up his thoughts in phrases designed to engrave themselves on his listeners’ skittish minds (‘Age is a sicknesse, and youth is an ambush’). Like all compelling aphorists, he had a keen command of binary oppositions (‘If you take away due fear, you take away true love’), in his case married to a lyrical sensibility which enabled him to soar along contrails of rare adjectives before bringing his congregation up short with a maxim of homespun simplicity (‘Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee’). He situated himself vis-à-vis his audience without any hint of schoolmasterly pedantry. They could feel the truth of his ideas all the more intensely for it being delivered by someone who appeared to be appealingly human and flawed (‘I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in, and invite God, and his Angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his Angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door’).

  St Anthony preaching to carp: sixteenth-century illuminated manuscript. (illustration credit 4.10)

  More recently, the Christian oratorical tradition has been further developed by African-American preachers, particularly those of the Pentecostal and Baptist denominations. In churches across the United States, a Sunday sermon is not an occasion to sit with one eye trained on the clock while, from a lectern in the apse, a cleric impassively dissects the story of the Good Samaritan. Instead, believers are expected to open their hearts, clasp the hands of their neighbours, erupt into shouts of ‘All right now’ and ‘Amen, preacher’, let the Holy Spirit enter their souls and finally collapse in paroxysms of ecstatic wailing. Up on the stage, the preacher stokes the fires of his congregation’s enthusiasm through call-and-response, asking repeatedly, in a mesmerizing blend of vernacular expression and the vocabulary of the King James Bible, ‘Will you say Amen? I say will you say Amen?’

  However powerful any proposition may be, it becomes so much more so in front of a crowd of 500 people who exclaim in unison after every point:

  ‘… Thank you, Jesus.’

  ‘… Thank you, Saviour.’

  ‘… Thank you, Christ.’

  ‘… Thank you, Lord.’

  Could a lecture on Walt Whitman be as moving? (illustration credit 4.11)

  There is little chance of resisting a theological argument which flows like this one, from the stage of the New Vision Baptist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee:

  ‘None of us today is in jail.’

  (‘Amen, All right now, Amen, Preacher,’ say the members of the congregation.)

  ‘Lord have mercy.’

  (‘Amen.’)

  ‘So, brothers, sisters, we should never be in prison in our minds.’

  (‘Amen, Preacher.’)

  ‘Do you hear me, my brothers and sisters?’

  (‘Amen, amen, amen!’)

  The contrast with the typical lecture in the humanities could hardly be more damning. And unnecessary. What purpose can possibly be served by the academy’s primness? How much more expansive the scope of meaning in Montaignes essays would seem if a 100-strong and transported chorus were to voice its approval after every sentence. How much longer might Rousseau’s philosophical truths linger in our consciousness if they were structured around rhythmical verses of call-and-response. Secular education will never succeed in reaching its potential until humanities lecturers are sent to be trained by African-American Pentecostal preachers. Only then will our timid pedagogues be able to shake off their inhibitions during lectures on Keats or Adam Smith and, unconstrained by false notions of propriety, call out to their comatose audiences, ‘Do you hear me? I say do you hear me?’ And only then will their now-tearful students fall to their knees, ready to let the spirit of some of the world’s most important ideas enter and transform them.

  4.

  Aside from needing to be delivered eloquently, ideas also have to be repeated to us constantly. Three or
five or ten times a day, we must be forcibly reminded of truths that we love but otherwise will not be able to hold on to. What we read at nine in the morning we will have forgotten by lunchtime and will need to reread by dusk. Our inner lives must be lent a structure and our best thoughts reinforced to counter the continuous pull of distraction and disintegration.

  Religions have been wise enough to establish elaborate calendars and schedules which lay claim to the lengths as well as the depths of their followers’ lives, letting no month, day or hour escape without administration of a precisely calibrated dose of ideas. In the detailed way in which they tell the faithful what to read, think, sing and do at almost every moment, religious agendas seem at once sublimely obsessive and calmingly thorough. The Book of Common Prayer, for instance, decrees that its subscribers should always gather at six-thirty in the evening on the twenty-sixth Sunday after Trinity, as the candlelight throws shadows against the chapel walls, to listen to a reading from the second section of the deuterocanonical Book of Baruch, just as on 25 January they must always think of the Conversion of St Paul, and on the morning of 2 July reflect on the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary and imbibe the moral lessons of Job 3. Schedules are more exacting still for Catholics, whose days are punctuated by no fewer than seven occasions for prayer. Every evening at ten they must, for example, scan their consciences, read a Psalm, declare In manus tuas, Domine (‘Into your hands, Lord’), sing the Nunc dimittis from the second chapter of the Gospel of St Luke and conclude with a hymn to the mother of Jesus (‘Virgin now and always, take pity on us sinners’).

  How free secular society leaves us by contrast. It expects that we will spontaneously find our way to the ideas that matter to us and gives us weekends off for consumption and recreation. Like science, it privileges discovery. It associates repetition with punitive shortage, presenting us with an incessant stream of new information — and therefore it prompts us to forget everything.

  For example, we are enticed to go to the cinema to see a newly released film, which ends up moving us to an exquisite pitch of sensitivity, sorrow and excitement. We leave the theatre vowing to reconsider our entire existence in light of the values shown on screen, and to purge ourselves of our decadence and haste. And yet by the following evening, after a day of meetings and aggravations, our cinematic experience is well on its way towards obliteration, just like so much else which once impressed us but which we soon enough came to discard: the majesty of the ruins of Ephesus, the view from Mount Sinai, the poetry recital in Edinburgh, the feelings we had after putting down Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. In the end, all modern artists share something of the bathetic condition of chefs, for whereas their works may not themselves erode, the responses of their audiences will. We honour the power of culture but rarely admit with what scandalous ease we forget its individual monuments. Three months after we finish reading a masterpiece, we may struggle to remember a single scene or phrase from it.

  We won’t remember what we don’t reread: a Catholic schedule of texts. (illustration credit 4.12)

  Our favourite secular books do not alert us to how inadequate a one-off linear reading of them will prove. They do not identify the particular days of the year on which we ought to reconsider them, as the holy books do — in the latter case with 200 others around us and an organ playing in the background. There is arguably as much wisdom to be found in the stories of Anton Chekhov as in the Gospels, but collections of the former are not bound with calendars reminding readers to schedule a regular review of their insights. We would face grave accusations of eccentricity if we attempted to construct liturgies from the works of secular authors. At best, we haphazardly underline a few of the sentences that we most admire in them and which we may once in a while chance upon in an idle moment waiting for a taxi.

  The followers of the faiths feel no such inhibitions. For Jews, the ritual of reading aloud the Five Books of Moses, two sections at a time, on a Monday and a Thursday, has lain at the heart of their religion since the end of the Babylonian captivity in 537 BC. On the twenty-second day of the Hebrew month of Tishrei, the holiday of Simchat Torah marks the end of one read-through of the Books and the start of the next, with the final section of Deuteronomy and the first of Genesis being recited back to back. The congregant who has been assigned to read Deuteronomy 34:1–12 is quaintly designated the Chatan Torah (‘bridegroom of the Torah’), while the one in charge of reading Genesis 1 is referred to as the Chatan Bereshit (‘bridegroom of Genesis’). We secular types may think we love books, but how lacklustre our attachment must seem compared with that of the two bridegrooms who make seven circuits around the synagogue, chanting out their joy and beseeching God, ‘Hoshiah na’ (‘Deliver us’) while the other members of the congregation wave flags, kiss one another and shower sweets on all the children present. How regrettable that when we turn the final page of Marcel Proust’s Time Regained, our own society would consider us peculiar indeed if we went on to compete for the honour of being the bridegroom of Swann’s Way (Chatan Bereshit shel betzad shel Swann).

  5.

  Secular life is not, of course, unacquainted with calendars and schedules. We know them well in relation to work, and accept the virtues of reminders of lunch meetings, cash-flow projections and tax deadlines. We somehow feel, however, that it would be a violation of our spontaneity to be presented with rotas for rereading Walt Whitman or Marcus Aurelius. Moved though we may be by Leaves of Grass or the Meditations, we deny that there might be any need, if we wish these books to have a genuine influence on our lives, of revisiting them daily. We are more alarmed by the potentially asphyxiating effects of being compelled to have structured encounters with ideas than by the notion that we might otherwise be in danger of forgetting them altogether.

  But forget them we do. The modern world is dense with stimuli, of which none is more insistent than that torrent which we capture with the term ‘news’. This entity occupies in the secular sphere much the same position of authority that the liturgical calendar has in the religious one, its main dispatches tracking the canonical hours with uncanny precision: matins have here been transubstantiated into the breakfast bulletin, and vespers into the evening report.

  The prestige of the news is founded on the unstated assumption that our lives are forever poised on the verge of critical transformation thanks to the two driving forces of modern history: politics and technology. The earth must therefore be latticed with fibre-optic cables, the waiting rooms of its airports filled with monitors and the public squares of cities ribboned with the chase of stock prices.

  For religions, by contrast, there is seldom any need to alter insights or harvest them incrementally through news bulletins. The great stable truths can be written down on vellum or carved into stone rather than swilling malleably across handheld screens. For 1.6 billion Buddhists, there has been no news of world-altering significance since 483 BC. For their Christian counterparts, the critical events of history came to a close around Easter Sunday in AD 30, while for the Jews the line was drawn a little after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Roman general Titus in AD 70.

  Even if we do not concur with the specific messages that religions schedule for us, we can still concede that we have paid a price for our promiscuous involvement with novelty. We occasionally sense the nature of our loss at the end of an evening, as we finally silence the television after watching a report on the opening of a new railway or the tetchy conclusion to a debate over immigration and realize that — in attempting to follow the narrative of man’s ambitious progress towards a state of technological and political perfection — we have sacrificed an opportunity to remind ourselves of quieter truths which we know about in theory and forget to live by in practice.

  6.

  Our peculiar approach to culture spills over from education into associated fields. Comparably suspect assumptions are rife, for example, in the manufacture and sale of books.

  Here too we are presented with infinitely more
material than we can ever assimilate and we struggle to hold on to what matters most to us. A moderately industrious undergraduate pursuing a degree in the humanities at the beginning of the twenty-first century might run through 800 books before graduation day; by comparison, a wealthy English family in 1250 would have counted itself fortunate to have three books in its possession, this modest library consisting of a Bible, a collection of prayers and a compendium of lives of the saints — these nevertheless costing as much as a cottage. If we lament our book-swamped age, it is because we sense that it is not by reading more, but by deepening and refreshing our understanding of a few volumes that we best develop our intelligence and our sensitivity. We feel guilty for all that we have not yet read, but overlook how much better read we already are than Augustine or Dante, thereby ignoring that our problem lies squarely with our manner of absorption rather than with the extent of our consumption.

  We are often urged to celebrate not only that there are so many books to hand, but also that they are so inexpensive. Yet neither of these circumstances should necessarily be deemed unambiguous advantages. The costly and painstaking craftsmanship behind a pre-Gutenberg Bible — revealed in the illuminated flowers in the margins, the naive drawings of Jonah and the whale and the brilliant blue skies dotted with exotic birds above the Virgin — was the product of a society which accepted containment as the basis for immersion, and which wished to elevate individual books into objects of extraordinary beauty so as to emphasize their spiritual and moral significance.

  Though technology has rendered it more or less absurd to feel gratitude over owning a book, there remain psychological advantages in rarity. We can revere the care that goes into making a Jewish Sefer Torah, the sacred scroll of the Pentateuch, a copy of which will take a single scribe a year and a half to write out by hand, on a parchment made from the hide of a ceremonially slaughtered goat which has been soaked for nine days in a rabbinically prepared mixture of apple juice, saltwater and gall nuts. We should be prepared to swap a few of our swiftly disintegrating paperbacks for volumes that would proclaim, through the weight and heft of their materials, the grace of their typography and the beauty of their illustrations, our desire for their contents to assume a permanent place in our hearts.