Religion for Atheists

by Alain De Botton

  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.

  Piccadilly Circus: the Messier 101 galaxy, part of the constellation Ursa Major, via the Hubble telescope. (illustration credit 7.1)

  VIII

  Art

  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.

  What should we do with her when we can’t pray to her? Virgin and Child, c. 1324, confiscated from the Abbey of Saint-Denis, Paris, in 1789. (illustration credit 8.1)

  It can be so hard not to think of the cafeteria: Thomas Struth, National Gallery I, London 1989. (illustration credit 8.2)

  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.

  What might we do in front of this? Fiona Banner, Every Word Unmade, 2007. (illustration credit 8.3)

  The puzzlement shared by museum-goers only increases when we turn to the art of our own era. We look at a giant neon version of the alphabet. We take in a vat of gelatinous water in which a sheet of aluminium fixed to a motor is swaying back and forth to the amplified sound of a human heartbeat. We watch a grainy film of an elderly woman slicing an apple, intercut with footage of a lion running across a savannah. And we think to ourselves that only an idiot or a reactionary would dare to ask what all this could mean. The only certainty is that neither the artist nor the museum is going to help us: wall texts are kept to a minimum; catalogues are enigmatically written. It would take a brave soul to raise a hand.

  3.

  Christianity, by contrast, never leaves us in any doubt about what art is for: it is a medium to remind us about what matters. It exists to guide us to what we should worship and revile if we wish to be sane, good people in possession of well-ordered souls. It is a mechanism whereby our memories are forcibly jogged about what we have to love and to be grateful for, as well as what we should draw away from and be afraid of.

  The German philosopher Hegel defined art as ‘the sensuous presentation of ideas’. It is, he indicated, in the business of conveying concepts, just like ordinary language, except that it engages us through both our senses and our reason, and is uniquely effective for its dual modes of address.

  Audrey Bardou, grandparents with their grandchildren, 2008. (illustration credit 8.4)

  Art is the sensuous presentation of ideas crucial to the health of our souls.

  Here, a reminder of love. Top: Filippino Lippi, The Adoration of the Child, early 1480s. (illustration credit 8.5)

  To return to one of the familiar themes of this book, we need art because we are so forgetful. We are creatures of the body as well as of the mind, and so require art to stir our languid imaginations and motivate us in ways that mere philosophical expositions cannot. Many of our most important ideas get flattened and overlooked in everyday life, their truth rubbed off through casual use. We know intellectually that we should be kind and forgiving and empathetic, but such adjectives have a tendency to lose all their meaning until we meet with a work of art that grabs us through our senses and won’t let us go until we have properly remembered why these qualities matter and how badly society needs them for its balance and its sanity. Even the word love has a habit of growing sterile and banal in the abstract, until the moment when we glimpse a contemporary photograph of two grandparents patiently feeding their grandchildren an apple purée for supper, or a fifteenth-century rendering of Mary and her son at nap-time — and remember why love lies at the core of our humanity.

  We might modify Hegel’s definition to bring it more fully into line with Christianity’s insights: good art is the sensuous presentation of those ideas which matter most to the proper functioning of our souls — and yet which we are most inclined to forget, even though they are the basis for our capacity for contentment and virtue.

  A role for art at key moments of life: tavolette. (illustration credit 8.6)

  Christianity was never troubled by the notion of charging art with an educative, therapeutic mission. Its own art willingly aspired to the status of propaganda. Although the noun has become one of the more frightening in our lexicon, coloured by the sinister ends towards which certain historical regimes have put it to work, propaganda is a neutral concept in its essence, suggesting merely influence rather than any particular direction for it. We may associate propaganda with corruption and tasteless posters, but Christianity took it to be synonymous with the artistic enhancement of our receptivity to such qualities as modesty, friendship and courage.

  From the fourteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, a brotherhood in Rome was renowned for tracking down prisoners on their way to the gallows and placing before their eyes tavolette, or small boards bearing images from the Christian story — usually of Christ on the Cross or the Virgin and Child — in the hope that these representations would bring the condemned solace in their final minutes. It is difficult to conceive of a more extreme example of a belief in the redemptive capacity of images, and yet the brotherhood was only carrying out a mission to which Christian art has always been committed: that of putting examples of the most important ideas in front of us at difficult moments, to help us to live and to die.

  4.

  Among these important ideas, none has been more significant to Christianity than the notion of suffering. We are all, in the religion’s eyes, inherently vulnerable beings who will not get through life without meeting with atrocious griefs of mind and body. Christianity also knows that any pain is aggravated by a sense that we are alone in experiencing it. However, we are as a rule not very skilled at communicating the texture of our troubles to others, or at sensing the sorrows they themselves are hiding behind stoic façades. We are therefore in need of art to help us to understand our own neglected hurt, to grasp everything that does not come up in casual conversation and to coax us out of an unproductively isolated relationship with our most despised and awkward qualities.

  So that we should all know what suffering is like, realize that none of us will escape it and grow kinder through this recognition: Matthias Grünewald, Isenheim Altarpiece, 1516. (illustration credit 8.7)

  For a thousand years and more, Christian artists have been directing their energies towards making us feel what it would be like to have large, rusty nails hammered into our palms, to bleed from weeping wounds in our sides and to climb a steep hill on legs already broken by the weight of the cross we are carrying. The depiction of such pain is not meant to be ghoulish; rather, it is intended to be a route to moral and psychological development, a way to increase our feelings of solidarity as well as our capacities for compassion.

  In the spring of 1512, Matthias Grünewald began work on an altarpiece for the Monastery of St Anthony in Isenheim, in north-eastern France. The monks of this order specialized in tending to the sick, and most particularly to those afflicted with ergotism, or St Anthony’s fire, a usually fatal disease which causes seizures, hallucinations and gangrene. Once the work was ready, it became customary for patients, on their arrival at the monastery, to be taken to the chapel to see it, so that they might understand that in the suffering they were now enduring, they had once been equalled, and perhaps exceeded, by God’s own son.

  It is fundamental
to the power of the Christian story that Jesus died in more or less the greatest agony ever experienced by anyone. He thus offers all human beings, however racked by illness and grief, evidence that they are not alone in their condition — sparing them, if not suffering itself, then at least the defeated feeling that they have been singled out for unusual punishment.

  Jesus’s story is a register of pain — betrayal, loneliness, self-doubt, torture — through which our own anguish can be mirrored and contextualized, and our impressions of its rarity corrected. Such impressions are of course not hard to form, given how vigorously society waves away our difficulties and surrounds us with sentimental commercial images which menace us by seeming so far removed from our reality in their promises.

  Christianity recognizes the capacity of the best art to give shape to pain and thereby to attenuate the worst of our feelings of paranoia and isolation. Catholic artists have long been in the habit of producing cycles of paintings known as the Seven Sorrows of Mary, renderings of the most painful episodes in the life of the Virgin, from the prophecy of Simeon to Jesus’s death and burial. Tradition dictates that the faithful should meditate on these works and endeavour through them to better understand not only Mary’s trials but also those endured by mothers more generally. The underlying intention of these Marian cycles, although they were defined by the particularities of Catholicism, could nevertheless be a source of inspiration for atheists. We might consider setting contemporary artists the task of depicting a Seven Sorrows of Parenthood, a Twelve Sorrows of Adolescence or a Twenty-one Sorrows of Divorce.

  Bernard van Orley and Pedro Campana, The Seven Sorrows of the Virgin (detail), c. 1520–35. (illustration credit 8.8)