Religion for Atheists

by Alain De Botton

  As this chapter has suggested, culture is more than adequately equipped to confront our dilemmas without having to rely on religious dogma. The errors that wreak havoc on our personal and political lives have been supplying subject matter for cultural works since antiquity. There is no shortage of information about folly, greed, lust, envy, pride, sentimentality or snobbishness in the canon; all the clues we need can be found in such oeuvres as those of Freud, Marx, Musil, Andrei Tarkovsky, Kenzaburo Oe, Fernando Pessoa, Poussin or Saul Bellow. The problem is that this treasury has seldom been effectively filleted and skilfully served up to us due to unfounded biases against the use of culture in the service of our griefs.

  No existing mainstream secular institution has a declared interest in teaching us the art of living. To draw an analogy from the history of science, the ethical field is at the stage of amateurs tinkering with chemicals in garden sheds rather than that of professionals conducting well-structured experiments in research laboratories. University academics, the obvious candidates for any soul-focused pedagogical task, have distanced themselves from demands for relevance by retreating behind a pose of a priori importance. They have shunned the responsibility of seducing their audiences, they have been fatally frightened of simplicity, they have pretended not to notice how fragile we are and they have been blind to how readily we forget everything, however significant it may be.

  Religion is laden with ideas for correctives. Its example proposes a new curriculum: a scheme for arranging knowledge according to the challenges to which it relates rather than the academic area in which it happens to fall; a strategy of reading for a purpose (to become better and saner); an investment in oratory and a set of methods for memorizing and more effectively publishing ideas.

  In case some of these educational practices should to certain ears sound too Christian, we should remember that they frequently far preceded the birth of Jesus. The Greeks and Romans had long been interested in how to calibrate knowledge to inner needs: it was they who first founded schools for disseminating wisdom, compared books to medicines and saw value in rhetoric and repetition. We should not let atheism get in the way of appreciating traditions that are part of a shared non-denominational heritage that was historically stamped out by secularists from a misunderstanding of the real identities of those who had once created it.

  Religions do not, as modern universities will, limit their teaching to a fixed period of time (a few years of youth), a particular space (a campus) or a single format (the lecture). Recognizing that we are as much sensory as cognitive creatures, they understand that they will need to use all possible resources to sway our minds. Many of their methods, though remote from contemporary notions of education, should nevertheless be considered essential to any plan to render ideas, be they theological or secular, more effective in our porous minds. These techniques deserve to be studied and adopted, so that we stand a chance of making at least one or two fewer mistakes than the previous generation in the time that remains to us.

  V

  Tenderness

  1.

  A fifteenth-century chapel in a backstreet of an unnamed northern European town. It is early afternoon on a sombre winter’s day and a middle-aged man shakes down his umbrella and steps inside. The space is warm and dark, lit only by several rows of candles that throw a dance of shadows across the limestone walls. There are comfortable, well-worn pews and, on the floor, prayer cushions, each one embroidered with the words Mater Dolorosa. An elderly woman kneels in the far corner, mumbling to herself with her eyes closed.

  The man is exhausted. His joints ache. He feels weak, vulnerable and close to tears. No single event has brought him to this point, just a run of minor humiliations that have cumulatively contributed to an overwhelming sense of mediocrity, superfluousness and self-hatred. His career, once so promising, has for a long time now been in descent. He knows how unimpressive he must appear to others, how keen they are to move on from him in social gatherings and just how many of his proposals and letters have gone unanswered. He no longer has the confidence to push himself forward. He is appalled by the seams of impatience and vanity in his character which have led him to this professional impasse. He is stricken by feelings of remorse, foreboding and loneliness. He knows, however, that he couldn’t possibly bring these worries home with him. The boys need to believe in his strength. His harried wife has too much on her plate already — and he has learned from experience how badly things turn out when he presents himself to the household in this mood.

  He wants to fall asleep and be held. He wants to cry. He wants to be forgiven and reassured. There is music playing through concealed speakers in the chapel, the aria ‘Erbarme dich, mein Gott’ from Bach’s St Matthew Passion. He searches for ideas he can cling to, but nothing seems solid. He is unable to think logically and even making the effort to do so has become more than he can bear.

  Having fallen to his knees, he looks up at the painting that hangs above the altar. It shows a tender, sympathetic, gentle young woman with a halo around her head. She gazes back down at him with infinite care — and, without his having to say a word, seems to understand everything.

  He remembers the prayers learned so long ago as a child, when he was still thought to be full of potential, when he knew how to make others proud of him, when his parents worried how much he had had to eat and wiped his sticky fingers for him after a meal and when the world and all its opportunities lay before him: ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, Amen.’ He closes his eyes and feels the press of tears against his eyelids. ‘To you I come; before you I stand, sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in your mercy hear me and answer me …’

  2.

  Although we have located this scene in Europe, it could unfold almost anywhere in the world. Comparable moments of despair are to be witnessed every day in the Chapel of Our Lady of Good Health in Kuala Lumpur and the Shrine of Our Lady of Sorrows in Rhineland, Missouri, in the Grotto of Unyang Dedicated to Our Lady in South Korea and the Nuestra Señora del Espejo in Venezuela. In these sanctuaries the desperate will glance up at the Virgin, light candles, say prayers and speak of their individual griefs to a woman who is not only Redemptoris Mater, mother of the redeemer, but also Mater Ecclesia, mother of the Church in its entirety and so, symbolically, of all its members.

  From a robustly rational perspective, Marian devotion seems to exemplify religion at its most infantile and soft-headed. How could any reasonable adult trust in the existence of a woman who lived several thousand years ago (if she ever lived at all), much less draw comfort from a projected belief in her unblemished heart, her selfless sympathy and her limitless patience?

  The drift of the question is hard to refute; it is simply the wrong question to raise. The apposite point is not whether the Virgin exists, but what it tells us about human nature that so many Christians over two millennia have felt the need to invent her. Our focus should be on what the Virgin Mary reveals about our emotional requirements — and, in particular, on what becomes of these demands when we lose our faith.

  In the broadest sense, the cult of Mary speaks of the extent to which, despite our adult powers of reasoning, our responsibilities and our status, the needs of childhood endure within us. While for long stretches of our lives we can believe in our maturity, we never succeed in insulating ourselves against the kind of catastrophic events that sweep away our ability to reason, our courage and our resourcefulness at putting dramas in perspective and throw us back into a state of primordial helplessness.

  ‘I understand’: Giovanni Battista Salvi, The Madonna in Sorrow, c. 1650. (illustration credit 5.1)

  Prayers to Mary, Vilnius, Lithuania. (illustration credit 5.2)

  At such moments we may long to be held and reassured, as we were decades ago by some sympathetic adult, most likely our mother, a person who made us feel physically protected, stroked our hair, looked at us with benevolence and
tenderness and perhaps said not very much other than, very quietly, ‘of course’.

  Though such longings go largely unmentioned in adult society, it has been the achievement of religions to know how to reanimate and legitimate them. Mary in Christianity, Isis in ancient Egypt, Demeter in Greece, Venus in Rome and Guan Yin in China have all functioned as conduits to recollections of early tenderness. Their statues often stand in darkened, womb-like spaces, their faces are compassionate and supportive, they enable us to sit, talk and cry with them. The similarities between them are too great to be coincidental. We are dealing here with figures that have evolved not out of shared cultural origins but in response to the universal needs of the human psyche.

  Chinese Buddhists will visit Guan Yin for the very same reasons that Catholics call on Mary. She too has kind eyes and can suggest alternatives to despising oneself. In temples and outdoor plazas across China, adults allow themselves to be weak in her presence. Her gaze has a habit of making people cry — for the moment one breaks down isn’t so much when things are hard as when one finally encounters kindness and a chance to admit to sorrows one has been harbouring in silence for too long. Like Mary, Guan Yin has a sense of the difficulties involved in trying to lead a remotely adequate adult life.

  Guan Yin, Hainan Island, China. (illustration credit 5.3)

  3.

  By contrast with religion, atheism is prone to seem coldly impatient with our neediness. The longing for comfort which lies at the heart of the Marian cult seems perilously regressive and at odds with the rational engagement with existence on which atheists pride themselves. Mary and her cohorts have been framed as symptoms of urges which adults ought quickly to outgrow.

  At its most withering and intellectually pugnacious, atheism has attacked religion for blinding itself to its own motives, for being unwilling to acknowledge that it is, at base, nothing more than a glorified response to childhood longings which have been dressed up, recast in new forms and projected into the heavens.

  This charge may well be correct. The problem is that those who level it are themselves often involved in a denial, a denial of the needs of childhood. In their zeal to attack believers whose frailties have led them to embrace the supernatural, atheists may neglect the frailty that is an inevitable feature of all our lives. They may label as childish particular needs which should really be honoured as more generally human, for there is in truth no maturity without an adequate negotiation with the infantile and no such thing as a grown-up who does not regularly yearn to be comforted like a child.

  We can be touched and reassured because this is both us and not us: Giovanni Bellini, Madonna and Child, 1480. (illustration credit 5.4)

  Christianity describes the capacity to accept dependence as a mark of moral and spiritual health. Only the proud and vainglorious would attempt to deny their weaknesses, while the devout can declare without awkwardness, as a sign of their faith, that they have spent time in tears at the foot of a statue of a giant wooden mother. The cult of Mary recasts vulnerability as a virtue and thus corrects our habitual tendency to believe in a conclusive division between adult and childhood selves. At the same time, Christianity is appropriately delicate in the way it frames our needs. It allows us to partake of the comfort of the maternal without forcing us to face up to our lingering and inescapable desire for an actual mother. It makes no mention of our mother; it simply offers us the imaginative pleasures of being once again young, babied and cared for by a figure who is mater to the world.

  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.

  Adult life isn’t possible without moments when, with reason being ineffective, all we can do is regress. A secular Temple to Tenderness, backlit by Mary Cassatt’s 1893 painting The Child’s Bath. (illustration credit 5.5)

  VI

  Pessimism

  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.