Religion for Atheists

by Alain De Botton

  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.

  We would be wise to locate ideas of perfection in another world altogether: Jan Brueghel the Younger, Paradise, c. 1620. (illustration credit 6.1)

  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.

  The faiths have the good sense to provide us with angels to worship and lovers to tolerate. (illustration credit 6.2)

  6.

  A pessimistic worldview does not have to entail a life stripped of joy. Pessimists can have a far greater capacity for appreciation than their opposite numbers, for they never expect things to turn out well and so may be amazed by the modest successes which occasionally break across their darkened horizons. Modern secular optimists, on the other hand, with their well-developed sense of entitlement, generally fail to savour any epiphanies of everyday life as they busy themselves with the construction of earthly paradise.

  Accepting that existence is inherently frustrating, that we are forever hemmed in by atrocious realities, can give us the impetus to say ‘Thank you’ a little more often. It is telling that the secular world is not well versed in the art of gratitude: we no longer offer up thanks for harvests, meals, bees or clement weather. On a superficial level, we might suppose that this is because there is no one to say ‘Thank you’ to. But at base it seems more a matter of ambition and expectation. Many of those blessings for which our pious and pessimistic ancestors offered thanks, we now pride ourselves on having worked hard enough to take for granted. Is there really any need, we wonder, to carve out a moment of gratitude in honour of a sunset or an apricot? Are there not loftier goals towards which we might be aiming?

  Seeking to induct us in a contrary attitude of humility, the Jewish Prayer Book of the United Congregation commends a specific prayer to be said on the occasion of ‘eating a seasonal fruit for the first time in the year’, and another to mark the acquisition of ‘a new garment of significant value’. It even includes a prayer intended to prompt admiration for the complexity of the human digestive system:

  ‘Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who formed man in wisdom and created in him many orifices and cavities.

  It is revealed and known before the throne of Your glory that were one of them to be ruptured or blocked, it would be impossible to survive and stand before You.

  Blessed are You, Lord, Healer of all flesh, who does wondrous deeds.’

  7.

  Religions have wisely insisted that we are inherently flawed creatures: incapable of lasting happiness, beset by troubling sexual desires, obsessed by status, vulnerable to appalling accidents and always slowly dying.

  They have also, of course, in many cases believed in the possibility that a deity might be able to help us. We see this combination of despair and hope with particular clarity at Jerusalem’s Western or Wailing Wall, where since the second half of the sixteenth century, Jews have gathered to air their griefs and to beg their creator for help. At the base of the wall, they have written down their sorrows on small pieces of paper, inserted these into gaps among the stones and hoped that God would be moved to mercy by their pain.

  The Wailing Wall, Jerusalem. (illustration credit 6.3)

  Remove God from th
is equation and what do we have left? Bellowing humans calling out in vain to an empty sky. This is tragic and yet, if we are to rescue a shred of comfort from the bleakness, at least the dejected are to be found weeping together. Only too often, in bed late at night, we panic at sorrows which seem devilishly unique to us. No such illusions are possible at the Wailing Wall. It is clear that the whole race is forlorn. The Wall marks out a locus where the anguish we otherwise bear silently within us can be revealed for what it truly is: merely a thimbleful of sorrow in an ocean of suffering. It serves to reassure us of the ubiquity of disaster and definitively corrects the smiling assumptions unwittingly made by contemporary culture.

  Among the advertisements for jeans and computers high above the streets of our cities, we should place electronic versions of Wailing Walls that would anonymously broadcast our inner woes, and thereby give us all a clearer sense of what is involved in being alive. Such walls would be particularly consoling were they able to afford us a glimpse of what in Jerusalem is reserved only for the eyes of God: the particulars of the misfortunes of others, the details of the broken hearts, dashed ambitions, sexual fiascos, jealous stalemates and ruinous bankruptcies that normally remain hidden behind our impassive fronts. Such walls would lend us reassuring proofs that others too were worrying about their absurdity, counting how few summers they had left, crying over someone who abandoned them a decade ago and dynamiting their chances of success through idiocy and impatience. There would be no resolutions on offer in these venues, no end to suffering, only a basic — and yet infinitely comforting — public acknowledgement that we are none of us alone in the extent of our troubles and our lamentations.

  The gravest problems have no solutions, but it would help never again to have to labour under the illusion that we had been singled out for persecution. (illustration credit 6.4)

  VII

  Perspective

  1.

  For atheists, one of the most consoling texts of the Old Testament should be the Book of Job, which concerns itself with the theme of why bad things happen to good people — a question to which, intriguingly, it refuses to offer up simple, faith-based answers. Instead it suggests that it is not for us to know why events occur in the way they do, that we should not always interpret pain as punishment and that we should recall that we live in a universe riddled with mysteries, of which the vagaries in our fortunes are certainly not the largest or even, as we will become aware if only we can look at matters from a sufficient remove, among the most important.

  The Book of Job begins by introducing us to its eponymous hero, a man from Uz, on whom God appears to have bestowed every imaginable favour. When we first meet him, Job is living in a large house, he is virtuous and content, he has seven sons and three daughters, 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen and 500 donkeys. Then, in a single day, a catastrophic series of disasters befalls him, his family and his livestock. First a band of violent Sabaeans make off with the oxen and donkeys. Then a great storm breaks out and lightning kills every last one of the sheep. Members of a neighbouring tribe, the Chaldeans, steal the camels. Worst of all, a hurricane blows in from the desert and destroys the house of Job’s eldest son, killing the youth and all of his nine siblings, who have gathered inside for a feast.

  As if these tribulations were not enough, mysterious sores begin to spread over Job’s body, rendering his every least movement excruciating. Sitting in a pile of ashes, a broken man, Job scrapes at his skin with a shard of pottery and, in terror and sorrow, asks God why all of these things have happened to him.

  Job’s friends think they know the answer: he must have sinned. Bildad the Shuhite is certain that God would not have killed Job’s children had they — and Job himself — not done something very wrong. ‘God will not reject a righteous man,’ Bildad confides. Zophar the Naamathite goes so far as to hint that Job’s crimes must have been terrible indeed, and God generous in his treatment of him, because the Lord always forgives more than he punishes.

  Job dismisses these explanations, though, as nothing more than ‘proverbs of ashes’ and ‘defences of clay’. He knows that he has not sinned. Why, then, has he been beset by these troubles? Why has God forsaken him? Does God even exist?

  At last, after a good deal of further debate among the men, Yahweh himself is prompted to answer Job. From a whirlwind in the desert, furious, God thunders:

  ‘Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?

  Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee …

  Where wast thou when I laid

  the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou has understanding …

  By what way is the light parted, which scattereth the east wind upon the earth? …

  Out of whose womb came the ice? and the hoary frost of heaven …? …

  Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? …

  Doth the hawk fly by thy wisdom …? …

  Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?’

  Job’s direct challenge regarding God’s existence and ethical intentions is thus met with an indirect response, wherein the deity goes on at length about how little humans know of anything. Fragile, limited creatures that they are, how can they possibly understand the ways of God? he demands. And given their ignorance, what right do they have to use such words as undeserved and unmerited? There are untold things about the galaxy that mankind cannot properly interpret and upon which, therefore, it ought not presume to impose its flawed logic. Human beings did not bring the cosmos into being and, despite their occasional feelings to the contrary, they do not control or own it. God tries to shake Job out of his preoccupation with the events in his own life by drawing his attention to the immensity and variety of nature. He evokes a sweeping vision of the totality of existence, from the foundation of the earth to the tracks of the constellations, from the heights attained by a hawk in flight to the labour pains of a mountain goat, in the hope of instilling in the man from Uz a redeeming sense of awe.

  The strategy works: Job is reminded of the scale of all that surpasses him and of the age, size and mystery of space. God’s whirlwind, and the sonorous, sublime words he speaks, excite a pleasing terror in his audience, a sense of how petty are man’s disasters in comparison with the ways of eternity, leaving Job — and the rest of us, perhaps — a little readier to bow to the incomprehensible and morally obscure tragedies that every life entails.

  2.

  Some millennia after Job received his lesson from God, another Jew, Benedictus de Spinoza, undertook to reframe the same argument in a more secular idiom.

  Spinoza had no patience with the notion of an anthropomorphic Supreme Being who could speak to his followers from a mountaintop and dwelt in the clouds. For him, ‘God’ was merely a scientific term for the force that had created the universe, the first cause or, in the philosopher’s preferred phrase, the ‘cause of itself’, causa sui.

  As a philosophical construct, this God offered Spinoza considerable consolation. During moments of frustration and disaster, the philosopher recommended the adoption of a cosmic perspective, or a re-envisioning of the situation, in his famous and lyrical coinage, ‘under the aspect of eternity’, sub specie aeternitatis. Fascinated by the new technology of his age — and most of all by telescopes and the knowledge they yielded of other planets — Spinoza proposed that we use our imaginations to step outside ourselves and practise submitting our will to the laws of the universe, however contrary these might seem to our intentions.

  We are not so very far, here, from God’s advice to Job: rather than try to redress our humiliations by insisting on our wronged importance, we should instead endeavour to apprehend and appreciate our essential nothingness. The signal danger of life in a godless society is that it lacks reminders of the transcendent and therefore leaves us unprepared for disappointment and eventual annihilation. When God is dead, human beings — much to their detriment — are at risk of taking psychological centre stage. They imagine themselves to
be commanders of their own destinies, they trample upon nature, forget the rhythms of the earth, deny death and shy away from valuing and honouring all that slips through their grasp, until at last they must collide catastrophically with the sharp edges of reality.

  Our secular world is lacking in the sorts of rituals that might put us gently in our place. It surreptitiously invites us to think of the present moment as the summit of history, and the achievements of our fellow humans as the measure of all things — a grandiosity that plunges us into continuous swirls of anxiety and envy.

  3.

  Religion is above all a symbol of what exceeds us and an education in the advantages of recognizing our paltriness. It has natural sympathies with all those aspects of existence which decentre us: glaciers, oceans, microscopic life forms, newborn babies or the resonant language of Milton’s Paradise Lost (‘Floods and Whirlwinds of tempestuous fire …’). Being put in our place by something larger, older, greater than ourselves is not a humiliation; it should be accepted as a relief from our insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives.

  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.