A place to lie in wait for the shy, elusive insights: a Temple to Reflection. (illustration credit 9.8)
There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it. We can be sure that we have something especially crucial to address when the very notion of being alone grows unbearable. For this reason, religions have always been forceful in recommending that their followers observe periods of solitude, however much discomfort these might at first provoke. A modern Temple to Reflection would follow this philosophy, creating ideally reassuring conditions for contemplation, allowing us to wait in a restful bare room for those rare insights upon which the successful course of our life depends, but which normally run across our distracted minds only occasionally and skittishly like shy deer.
— A Temple for the Genius Loci
Among the more intriguing features of Imperial Roman religion was that it not only provided for the worship of cosmopolitan gods such as Juno and Mars (whose temples could be found all across the empire, from Hadrian’s Wall to the banks of the Euphrates) but also allowed for the reverence of a panoply of local deities, whose personalities reflected the character, either topographical or cultural, of their native regions. These protective spirits, known as ‘genii locorum’, were given temples of their own and developed reputations — which sometimes drew travellers to them from afar — for being able to cure a variety of ailments of the mind and body. The spirits from the coastline south of Naples, for example, were thought to be particularly well suited to the abatement of melancholy, while the genius loci of Colonia Iulia Equestris (modern-day Nyon, on the shore of Lake Geneva) was supposed to have a special talent for consoling those oppressed by the vagaries of political and commercial life.
Like so much else that seems sensible about Roman religion, the tradition of the genius loci was absorbed by Christianity, which made comparable connections between specific localities and their curative powers, though it chose to talk of shrines rather than temples, and of saints instead of spirits. The map of medieval Europe was dotted with holy sites, many of them built upon Roman foundations, which promised to grant the faithful relief from their physical and mental ills via contact with assorted body parts of dead Christian saints.
A Pilgrimage Map of Medieval Europe (illustration credit 9.9)
Altotting, Germany
Staving off the Plague (Virgin Mary)
Bad Munstereifel, Germany
Excessive Fears of Lightning (St Donatus)
Barrios de Colina, Spain
Infertility (San Juan de Ortega)
Buxton, England
Miracle Healings (St Anne)
Chartres, France
Burning Disease (St Anthony)
Conques, France
Soldiers before a Battle (St Foy)
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Throat Problems (St Blaise)
Hereford, England
Palsy (St Ethelbert)
Larchant, France
Madness (St Mathurin)
Lourdes, France
Magical Healing (St Bernadette)
Morcombelake, England
Sore Eyes (St Wite)
Padua, Italy
Lost Things (St Anthony of Padua)
Rome, Italy; Basilica of San Lorenzo
Painful Molar (St Apollonia)
Spoleto, Italy
Unhappily Married Women
(St Rita of Cascia)
Windsor Castle (Royal Chapen England
Headaches (“Good King Henry [VI]”)
The underlying spiritual seriousness of the souvenir industry: a fourteenth-century badge from the shrine of Thomas Becket, in Canterbury. (illustration credit 9.10)
Believers with painful dental issues, for instance, knew to travel to the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Rome, where they could touch the arm bones of St Apollonia, the patron saint of teeth. Unhappily married women went to Umbria to visit the shrine of St Rita of Cascia, patron saint of those with marital problems. Soldiers looking to embolden themselves before battle might commune with the bones of St Foy, kept in a gold-plated reliquary in the abbey-church of Conques, in southwestern France. Women who were having difficulty breast-feeding could find comfort at the Shrine of the Holy Breast Milk in Chartres. And those with excessive lightning phobias were commended to the German town of Bad Münstereifel, where they could lay their hands on the relics of St Donatus, renowned for relieving fears of fire and explosions.
On their arrival at the appropriate shrine, pilgrims would first head for the nearby shops that sold moulded wax models of the troublesome parts of themselves, from legs, ears and breasts to penises and even whole souls (in the form of babies). Once inside the shrines themselves, they would place their effigies on altars, tombs or caskets, kneel in prayer and beg the spirits of the saints for their help.
Afterwards, the pilgrims would repair to souvenir stalls. Following the declaration by the fourth-century theologian Cyril of Jerusalem that handkerchiefs which came into contact with the bodies of the martyrs would forever possess a supernatural power, these stalls had begun to carry plentiful supplies of linens. They also offered small glass vials containing dust from the floors around the saints’ tombs, which could be resorted to for assistance in moments of distress. A Benedictine monk named Guibert of Nogent once reported that a friend who had accidentally swallowed a toad and nearly choked to death was saved by a teaspoonful of dust from the tomb of St Marcel, Bishop of Paris. Most commonly, visitors were invited to acquire finely sculpted lead badges showing the face of the saint whose relics they had come to see. It was said of Louis XI of France, who had stopped in at every notable shrine in his country, that his hat was ‘brim-full of images which he kissed whenever good or bad news arrived’.
Although few of us would today walk a hundred kilometres to seek help for a fear of lightning, travelling nevertheless remains at the heart of many secular ideas of fulfilment. Our trips retain a role in cementing important inner transitions. While we might call them valuable rather than holy, there are places which by virtue of their remoteness, solitude, beauty or cultural richness retain an ability to salve the wounded parts of us.
Unfortunately, we lack any reliable mechanism or method for identifying these rare and curative locations. Here again, as so often when it comes to our emotional needs in the secular world, we miss the structure once provided for us by religions. Travel agents see themselves as being responsible solely for handling logistical matters — booking connecting flights, negotiating discounts on plane tickets and hotel rooms — and make little effort to help customers find their way to destinations that might bring a targeted benefit to their inner selves. We need psychoanalytically astute travel agents who could carefully analyse our deficiencies and match us up with parts of the world which would have the power to heal us — agents who would send us on travels to connect up with those qualities which we esteem but cannot generate in sufficient quantities at home.
We further suffer from a lack of shrines. Having arrived at our destination, we seldom know what to do with ourselves. We wander around in search of a centre. We long for a plausible crucible of significance, for somewhere, anywhere to go in order that we may touch the essence of the genius loci, but in the absence of alternatives we usually end up listlessly touring a museum, ashamed of ourselves for the strength of our desire to go back to our hotel and lie down.
How much more therapeutic our journeys might be if they could include a visit to a secular local shrine or temple, a work of architecture that would define and concentrate the qualities of its surrounding setting. Inside, we could deposit wax versions of our anxieties and immaturities, attempting thereby to formalize the purpose of our trip — while outside, in a row of small retail spaces, talented artists would sell inspiring tokens of the transformative powers of their settings.
One such shrine might be dedicated to the energy of a capital city, another to the purifying calmness of
the deserted tundra, a third to the promises of the tropical sun. These temples would offer homes to otherwise elusive genii locorum, and together teach us to regard travel as a means of existential healing, rather than merely a source of entertainment or relaxation.
A psychotherapeutic travel agency would align mental disorders with the parts of the planet best able to alleviate them. (illustration credit 9.11)
4.
There is no need to catalogue here all the themes that a new generation of temples might take up. There is in the end room in the world for as many different kinds of temple as there are varieties of need.
The point is only to argue that we should revive and continue the underlying aims of religious architecture, by expressing these through secular temples designed to promote important emotions and abstract themes, rather than through sacred shrines dedicated to embodied deities.
No less than the church spires in the skyscapes of medieval Christian towns, these temples would function as reminders of our hopes. They would vary in terms of their style, dimensions and forms — they could range from huts to hangars, they could be made of recycled tyres or gold tiles, they could hang from the sides of office buildings or be buried in illuminated grottoes under the streets — but they would all be connected through the ancient aspiration of sacred architecture: to place us for a time in a thoughtfully structured three-dimensional space, in order to educate and rebalance our souls.
X
Institutions
i. Books vs. Institutions
1.
When sceptics and atheists began their assaults on religion in the late eighteenth century, they did so primarily through the medium of books. They wondered in print whether a dead man could really roll back a tombstone and make his way unaided into the upper atmosphere, whether a young woman could be immaculately impregnated by a deity, whether battles could be won by the intercession of angels or earaches cured by contact with the shin bone of a martyred saint (Cornelius). And they tended to conclude their arguments by looking forward to the day when mankind might replace its superstitions with rationally based ideas, of the sort they admired in works of secular science, philosophy, literature and poetry.
Although these sceptics proved to be caustically entertaining critics of the faiths, they failed to appreciate the fundamental difference between themselves and their enemies: the latter were not relying primarily on the publication of books to achieve their impact. They were employing institutions, marshalling enormous agglomerations of people to act in concert upon the world through works of art, buildings, schools, uniforms, logos, rituals, monuments and calendars.
While laying out ideas in books — which might sell anywhere from a few hundred copies to a few hundred thousand at very best — may seem a noble enough ambition, the medium itself claims a dispiritingly meagre reach compared to the wide-ranging influence which institutions can wield in the development and perpetuation of attitudes and behaviours. In his Republic, Plato conveyed a touching understanding (born from experience) of the limits of the lone intellectual, when he remarked that the world would not be set right until philosophers became kings, or kings philosophers. In other words, writing books can’t be enough if one wishes to change things. Thinkers must learn to master the power of institutions for their ideas to have any chance of achieving a pervasive influence on the world.
However, secular intellectuals have, unfortunately, long suffered from a temperamental suspicion of institutions, rooted in the Romantic worldview which has coloured cultural life since the nineteenth century. Romanticism has taught us to mock the ponderousness and strictures of institutions, their tendencies to corruption and their tolerance of mediocrity. The ideal of the intellectual has been that of a free spirit living beyond the confines of any system, disdainful of money, cut off from practical affairs and privately proud of being unable to read a balance sheet.
If people’s inner lives remain even today more likely to be influenced by the biblical prophets than by secular thinkers, it is due in large part to the fact that the latter have been consistently unwilling to create institutional structures through which their soul-related ideas might be successfully disseminated to a wider audience. Those with an interest in addressing the needs of the secular soul have typically lacked scale, stable conditions of employment and the capacity to transmit their views through the mass media. Instead, volatile individual practitioners run what are in effect cottage industries, while organized religions infiltrate our consciousness with all the might and sophistication available to institutional power.
The modern world is not, of course, devoid of institutions. It is filled with commercial corporations of unparalleled size which have an intriguing number of organizational traits in common with religions. But these corporations focus only on our outer, physical needs, on selling us cars and shoes, pizzas and telephones. Religion’s great distinction is that while it has a collective power comparable to that of modern corporations pushing the sale of soap and mashed potatoes, it addresses precisely those inner needs which the secular world leaves to disorganized and vulnerable individuals.
The challenge is hence to create — via a study of religious institutions — secular entities that could meet the needs of the inner self with all the force and skill that corporations currently apply to satisfying the needs of the outer.
2.
Among the fundamental lessons of religions as institutions are the importance of scale and the benefits that flow from being able properly to aggregate money, intelligence and status.
Whereas Romanticism glorifies the achievements of singular heroes, religions know how much will be impossible if individuals act alone. Outside of an organization, we may now and then succeed in securing a brief spike of fame for ourselves, but we will never be able to place our achievements on a stable footing, consistently replicate our insights or bridge our weaknesses. Sole authorship cannot be a logical long-term response to solving the complexities of significant issues. We should ask why in matters of the soul we continue to believe in cloistered, companionless methods of assembly that we long ago disavowed in relation to the manufacture of pharmaceuticals or aircraft.
That we often think about deodorant and God but much less often meditate on the ideas of individual writers is reflected in a comparison of three statistics: the annual revenues of, respectively, the Catholic Church, a consumer goods company and the best-paid individual writer on the planet (the other 99.9 % of authors would not, of course, even register on the chart).
Then there is the matter of income. Institutions spare their members the humiliations and terrors of the sole trader. Their ability to pool capital, distribute it between projects and let it accumulate over decades enables them to survive lean periods and make adequate investments in research, marketing, recruitment and technology.
Whatever modern democracies may tell themselves about their commitment to free speech and to diversity of opinion, the values of a given society will uncannily match those of whichever organizations have the scale to pay for runs of thirty-second slots around the nightly news bulletin.
Scale has a similar impact on recruitment. Wealthy institutions can attract the best members of a generation, rather than just the blindly devoted or the irrationally committed. They can appeal to the large and psychologically healthy pool of candidates who care as much about garnering esteem and material comfort as they do about bettering the lot of mankind.
That a job is simply ‘interesting’ is never going to be enough to attract high numbers of the most energetic and ambitious employees.
Consider the respective careers of Thomas Aquinas and Friedrich Nietzsche. Some of the differences between their fates came down to the relative mental stability of the two men, but a good share of Aquinas’s equanimity must also be attributed to the benevolent spiritual and material atmosphere he benefited from, first at the University of Paris, where he was Regent Master, and then at the theological college he helped to found in Naples. Nietz
sche felt he lived by contrast (and in his own words) ‘like a wild animal hunted out of every lair’. His life’s project — to replace Christian morality with a secular ideology revolving around philosophy, music and art — found no favour with nineteenth-century German academia, forcing the philosopher into nomadic exile. Although he is frequently celebrated as a supreme exemplar of heroic individualism, the philosopher would in truth have appreciated nothing more than to exchange his isolation for a collegial establishment which could have lent his ideas a greater weight in the world.
Institutions have the added benefit of being able to offer permanent status to individuals simply on the basis of their membership, saving them from having to earn it on their own, over and over again, year by year. A lone thinker may be near the end of his or her life — or even, like Nietzsche, long dead — before the public notices that a good idea has sprung from someone without corporate status. Within an institution, all members can tap into a reputation built up by illustrious forebears and reinforced by elegant buildings and sleek bureaucratic processes. They can take on an ancient title — priest or archdeacon, professor or minister — and make use, for genuine ends, of the resources and lustre stored within a structure that is larger and more enduring than themselves.
Religion for Atheists Page 14