I've recently finished reading Francis Spufford's book Unapologetic. I have to say that I'm mightily impressed. One of things I've really enjoyed is the language, the writing: Spufford has a great way with words and I've really enjoyed the imagery and metaphors he uses and found they really connect and feel contemporary. He also has section where he writes phrases in contemporary speeck style -usually mildly sacrastic but showing thereby that some views are, well, a bit silly really and we should recognise that.
His main aim is not so much to give intellectual reasons for faith as to give insight to how the world looks from an intelligent Christian's perspective ("You can easily look up what Christians believe
in. You can read any number of defences of Christian ideas. This,
however, is a defence of Christian emotions – of their intelligibility,
of their grown-up dignity. The book is called Unapologetic because it
isn’t giving an ‘apologia’, the technical term for a defence of the
ideas. And also because I’m not sorry.") and why we aren't necessarily convinced by the New Athiest arguments (okay, that's where some of the odd excursuses into sarcasm come in, but even they make sense in context). As such I might even go as far as to say it's a postmodern Mere Christianity. I have a few -very few- points where I feel that in the theodicy bits, more credit to one or two of the answers might be given or at least explored further (see in the quotes and notes section below).
I suppose I should also mention that on a handful of occasions he uses 'fruity' language, but nothing beyond what you'd hear most days on public transport. And I think in most cases it's fair enough, even if not what I'd say.
All in all, definitely worth getting. It's one of the first books in ages that I've actively thought that I wanted to pass on and encourage others to read.
Quotes and notes from my Kindle
Those are the objections of people who care
enough about religion to object to it – or to rent a set of recreational
objections from Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens.
there’s something truly devoted about the way
that Dawkinsites manage to extract a stimulating hobby from the thought
of other people’s belief. The ones in this country must be envious of
the intensity of the anti-religious struggle in the United States; yet
some of them even contrive to feel oppressed by the Church of England,
which is not easy to do. It must take a deft delicacy at operating on a
tiny scale, like doing needlepoint, or playing Subbuteo, or fitting a
whole model-railway layout into an attaché case.
We’re weird because we’re inexplicable;
because, when there’s no necessity for it that anyone sensible can see,
we’ve committed ourselves to a set of awkward and absurd attitudes which
obtrude, which stick out against the background of modern life, and not
in some important or respect-worthy or principled way either; more in
the way that some particularly styleless piece of dressing does, which
makes the onlooker wince and look away
Most people’s lives provide them with a full
range of loves and hates and joys and despairs, and a moral framework by
which to understand them, and a place for awe and transcendence,
without any need for religion. Believers are the people touting a
solution without a problem, and an embarrassing solution too, a really
damp-palmed, wide-smiling, can’t-dance solution. In an anorak
The funny thing is that to me it’s exactly the
other way around. In my experience, it’s belief that involves the most
uncompromising attention to the nature of things of which you are
capable. It’s belief which demands that you dispense with illusion after
illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual, fluffy
pretending. Pretending that might as well be systematic, it’s so
thoroughly incentivised by our culture.
[about the atheist bus adverts: 'There probably isn't a God, so stop worrying and enjoy your life.']
the word that offends against realism here is
‘enjoy’. I’m sorry – enjoy your life? Enjoy your life? I’m not making
some kind of neo-puritan objection to enjoyment. Enjoyment is lovely.
Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is one
emotion. The only things in the world that are designed to elicit
enjoyment and only enjoyment are products, and your life is not a
product; you cannot expect to unwrap it,
To say that life is to be enjoyed ( just enjoyed) is like saying that mountains should only have summits.
The implication of the bus slogan is that
enjoyment would be your natural state if you weren’t being ‘worried’ by
us believers and our hellfire preaching. Take away the malignant threat
of God-talk, and you would revert to continuous pleasure, under
cloudless skies. What’s so wrong with this, apart from it being total
bollocks? Well, in the first place, it buys a bill of goods, sight
unseen, from modern marketing.
let’s be clear about the emotional logic of the
bus’s message. It amounts to a denial of hope or consolation, on any but
the most chirpy, squeaky, bubble-gummy reading of the human situation.
St Augustine called this kind of thing ‘cruel optimism’ fifteen hundred
years ago, and it’s still cruel.
But it is still a mistake to suppose that it
is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer. It is the
feelings that are primary. I assent to the ideas because I have the
feelings; I don’t have the feelings because I’ve assented to the ideas.
The emotions that sustain religious belief are
all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who
has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as
an adult. They are utterly familiar and utterly intelligible, and not
only because the culture is still saturated with the spillage of
Christianity, slopped out of the broken container of faith and soaked
through everything. This is something more basic at work, an
unmysterious consanguinity with the rest of experience.
[Re sin and it's bad press in contemporary western culture]
‘Sin’, you can see, always refers to the
pleasurable consumption of something. Also, it always preserves some
connection to sex, which is why it would seem creepy for it ever to
appear in the branding of a product aimed at children, and sometimes the
sex is literal, but usually it’s been disembodied, reduced to a mere
tinge of the amosphere of desire, and transferred from sex itself to
another bodily satisfaction,
The other universal is that ‘sin’ always
encodes a memory of ancient condemnation: but a distant memory, a very
faint and inexplicable memory, just enough of a memory to add a zing of
conscious naughtiness to whatever the pleasure in question is.
Everybody knows, then, that ‘sin’ basically
means ‘indulgence’ or ‘enjoyable naughtiness’. If you were worried,
you’d use a different word or phrase. You’d talk about ‘eating
disorders’ or ‘addictions’; you’d go to another vocabulary cloud
altogether.
If I say the word ‘sin’ to you, I’m basically
buggered (as we like to say in the Church of England). It’s going to
sound as if I’m bizarrely opposed to pleasure, and because of the
continuing link between ‘sin’ and sex, it will seem likely that at the
root of my problem with pleasure is a problem with sex. You will
diagnose me as a Christian body-hater. You’ll corral me among the
enemies of ordinary joy. You’ll class me with the holy life-haters
William Blake was thinking of, in the poem in his Songs of Experience ...
You’re lying in the bath and you notice that
you’re thirty-nine and that the way you’re living bears scarcely any
resemblance to what you think you’ve always wanted; yet you got here by
choice, by a long series of choices for things which, at any one moment,
temporarily outbid the things you say you wanted most. And as the water
cools, and the light of Saturday morning in summer ripples heartlessly
on the bathroom ceiling, you glimpse an unflattering vision of yourself
as a being whose wants make no sense, don’t harmonise: whose desires,
deep down, are discordantly arranged, so that you truly want to possess
and you truly want not to, at the very same time. You’re equipped, you
realise, for farce (or even tragedy) more than you are for happy
endings. The HPtFtU [Human Propensity to Fuck things Up] dawns on you. You have, indeed, fucked things up. Of
course you have.
[Moving on from sin]
I will give awe its due later, I promise, but
the trouble with it as a starting-point is that it is, by its nature, a
rather isolated emotion, marked out by its sudden self-forgetting focus
on an object external to us, and by its disconnection from everyday
trundling along. If awe is powerful, it tends to be a state we fall out
of knackered, after a while, unable to keep up the intensity. If it’s
more modest, it tends of its nature to fade away anyway, to peter out on
the hilltop where it began. And in neither case is it obvious how awe
is supposed to relate to the rest of experience. I think of awe as a
kind of National Trust property among feelings: somewhere to visit from
time to time, but not a place you can live.)
Over the last fifty years, we really have been
escaping, as a culture, from a set of cruel and constricting rules,
particularly about sexuality and gender roles, which (yes) did have the
sanction of religion behind them. (Not that religion caused those rules
to exist, on the whole. There was a malignant cultural consensus in
place in their favour, of which religion was a part.)
In my experience, in times of intense misery
it’s letting your guilt be guilt that at least stops you needing to
accuse yourself; and in better times, in times of more or less cheerful
ordinary muddling through, I’ve found that admitting there’s some black
in the colour-chart of my psyche doesn’t invite the blot of dark to
swell, or give a partial truth more gloomy power over me than it should
have, but the opposite. Admitting there’s some black in the mixture
makes it matter less. It makes it easier to pay attention to the
mixedness of the rest. It helps you stop wasting your time on denial,
and therefore helps you stop ricocheting between unrealistic self-praise
and unrealistic self-blame. It helps you be kind to yourself.
We find it hard to acknowledge the seriousness
of ordinary screw-ups, because we get very worried by the idea that we
might be judging people, ‘judgemental’ being another Bad Word of our
time – or ‘sitting in judgement’ on them, which draws the instant mental
picture of us being raised above them, on some kind of courtroom
throne, gazing down with a brow like thunder. And isn’t this what
religion famously encourages people to do? To judge, to criticise, to
carp, to find fault? Well, no. (Though lots of religious people do carp,
criticise, judge, find fault. See above, under: HPtFtU. I may, ahem, be
a little inclined to fault-finding myself.) Ironically enough, the
taboo about being ‘judgemental’ wasn’t formed in our culture in reaction
to religion; it isn’t part of the great journey into the secular light
on which A. C. Grayling is leading us, tossing his miraculously bouffant
locks. It is, itself, a little piece of inherited Christianity, a
specifically Christian prohibition which has turned proverbial and
floated free of its context, origins all forgotten, until we imagine
that it means we shouldn’t even think in terms of good and bad.
Originally, what it meant was that we shouldn’t think of good and bad in
terms of laws, or in terms of a courtroom procedure which would find
people guilty or not guilty
notice the consequence of having an ideal of
behaviour not sized for human lives: everyone fails. Really everyone. No
one only means well, no one means well all the time. Looked at from
this perspective, human beings all exhibit different varieties of
fuck-up. And suddenly in its utter lack of realism Christianity becomes
very realistic indeed, intelligently resigned to our vast array of
imperfections, and much more interested in what we can do to live with
them than in laws designed to keep them segregated
If you happened to be crouched in a shell-crater
on a battlefield when you made your experiment in prayer, on the
no-atheists-in-foxholes principle, the bullets continue to zip towards
you on trajectories that are perfectly unaltered. You can beat with your
fists on it and the door stays locked, possibly because the thing
you’re asking to open isn’t even a door. It’s one of the walls. It’s
just one of the smooth, flat, hard, sintered surfaces of the state of
things.
... arriving at Him as people do in
experience: not as a philosophical proposition, an abstract possibility,
but as the answer to a need, something we might yearn toward for
reasons of intelligible guilt or sorrow, whether or not there’s anything
there to satisfy the yearning.
My Note: I suppose that I want to put in a plea for those who don't arrive from those points of departure: some of us came from places of songing for meaning or an inescapable sense of the more-ness of existence.
[on the experience of praying]
for us too, nothing happens when we ask for
help. The nothing that happens is universal, an experience shared by
believers and unbelievers alike. It is true that we understand the
nothing differently, but not because we start from a different
experience of it.
It’s hard to listen, even when misery nudges
you into trying. Fortunately, the international league of the guilty has
littered the landscape with specialised buildings where attention comes
easier. I walk in. I glance around. And I see the objects that
different ages carried in here because they thought they were precious,
tattered battle flags and stained glass, carved wood and memorials
saying he was a magistrate of unequalled probity: not in order to
declare, those past people, that this was a place where only a precious
and tasteful selection from human behaviour was welcome, but the
opposite, to celebrate with the best things they had the way the place
acknowledged absolutely all of human behaviour. The calm in here is not
denial. It’s an ancient, imperturbable lack of surprise. To any
conceivable act you might have committed, the building is set up only to
say, ah, so you have, so you did; yes. Would you like to sit down? I
sit down. I shut my eyes.
[on becoming aware of Someone/thing Beyond and Intimate]
And now I’ve forgotten to breathe, because the
shining something, an infinitesimal distance away out of the universe,
is breathing in me and through me, and though the experience is grand
beyond my powers to convey, it’s not impersonal. Someone, not something,
is here. Though it’s on a scale that defeats imagining and exists
without location (or exists in all locations at once) I feel what I feel
when there’s someone beside me. I am being looked at. I am being known;
known in some wholly accurate and complete way that is only possible
when the point of view is not another local self in the world but glows
in the whole medium in which I live and move. I am being seen from
inside, but without any of my own illusions. I am being seen from
behind, beneath, beyond. I am being read by what I am made of
And while it may be safe, it is not kind in
one of the primary ways in which human beings set about being kind to
each other. It takes no account, at all, of my illusions about myself.
It lays me out, roofless, wall-less, worse than naked. It knows where my
kindness comes chequered with secret cruelties or mockeries. It knows
where my love comes with reservations. It knows where I hate, and fear,
and despise. It knows what I indulge in. It knows what parasitic
colonies of habit I have allowed to form in me. It knows the best of me,
which may well be not what I am proud of, and the worst of me, which is
not what it has occurred to me to be ashamed of. It knows what I have
forgotten. It knows all this, and it shines at me. In fact it never
stops shining. It is continuous, this attention it pays. I cannot make
it turn away. But I can turn away from it, easily; all I have to do is
to stop listening to the gentle, unendingly patient call it stitches
through the fabric of everything there is. It compels nothing, so all I
have to do is stop paying attention. And I do, after not very long. I
can’t bear, for very long at once, to be seen like that. To be seen like
that is judgement in itself
These are explanations of how my feelings
might have arisen, physically, but they don’t explain my feelings away.
They don’t prove that my feelings were not really my feelings. They
certainly don’t prove that there was nobody there for me to be feeling
them about. If God does exist, then from my point of view it’s hard to
see how a physical creature like myself could ever register His presence
except through some series or other of physically-determined bodily
states.
Starting to believe in God is a lot like
falling in love, and there is certainly a biochemical basis for that.
Cocktails of happy hormones make you gooey and trusting; floods of
neurotransmitters make your thoughts skip elatedly along. Does this
prove that the person you love is imaginary? It does not. The most the
physical accounts demonstrate, where God is concerned, is that He isn’t
necessary as an explanation. Which I feel does not really amount to
news. I kind of knew that anyway, my philosophical starting-point for
all this being that we don’t need God to explain any material aspect of
the universe, including our mental states; while conversely, no material
fact about the universe is ever going to decide for us whether He
exists. God’s non-necessity in explanations is a given, for me. For me,
it means that I’m only ever going to get to faith by some process quite
separate from proof and disproof; that I’m only going to arrive at it
because, in some way that it is not in the power of evidence to rebut,
it feels right.
may not be interested in proof – you can’t
disprove the existence of a feeling – but I am interested in the
feeling’s philosophical dignity.
showing that God-the-evolved-organism is
unlikely says nothing about the probability of the different thing we do
in fact believe. Arguing with people imposes an unfortunate necessity
to find out what they think before you open your big mouth to contradict
the Russellian teapot argument commits the fallacy of assuming the state of the universe it seeks to demonstrate.
[Positivism] tends to believe that it is science; it thinks
that what it sees around it is the bare, disenchanted, unmediated,
uncoloured truth delivered by the scientific method. Look, no gods!
Also, no fairies, no unicorns, no griffins, no leprechauns. A quick
census of the local fauna confirms it: case solved. But this perceptual
world isn’t science. It is a cultural artefact created by one version of
the cultural influence of science, specific to the last two centuries
in Europe and North America. It is not a direct, unmediated picture of
reality; far from it. It is a drastically human-centred, human-scaled
selection from the physical universe, comfortably restricted to the
order of reality which is cooked rather than raw, which happens within
the envelope of society. It scarcely touches on what the world is like
apart from us.
... treats us living creatures as the
securely-tenured lords of all we survey, rather than as the brief
ripples of information we actually amount to. In fact
I myself am a Christian and not a Muslim or a
Buddhist for a mixture of the two different kinds of reason; as an
outcome of both kinds of process. On the passive side, Christianity was
the religion of my childhood. It’s the ancient religion, for something
like forty generations, of the place I come from. It’s the matrix of my
culture. But it’s also something I came back to, freely, as an adult,
after twenty-odd years of atheism, because piece by piece I have found
that it answers my need, and corresponds to emotional reality for me. I
also find that the elaborated structure of meaning it builds, the story
it tells, explains that reality more justly, more profoundly, more
scrupulously and plausibly than any of the alternatives. (Am I sure I’m
right? Of course not. Don’t you get bored with asking that question?)
[ Matters of Evil]
... stay in the domain of living processes and the
reproduction thereof: as well as backing the existence of roses and
kittens, the God of everything must sustain tapeworms, necrotising
bacteria that reduce flesh to a puddle of pus, and parasitic wasps as
they eat their way out of their hosts. Any cell that divides in any
organism must be doing so in the radiance of the universal attention.
Our judgements of beauty and utility and desirability are beside the
point. Crocuses multiply, and so do anthrax spores, and the God of
everything smiles on all alike. The same has to be true of all the acts
and events of human societies; and of all places, and of all times; and
in fact of every configuration of matter and energy everywhere,
continuously. The God of everything must be equally present for
everything. You name it. He is exactly as present in a room in a failing
strip-mall where a malfunctioning fluorescent tube is jittering out
headache for all onlookers as He is in a cathedral. He pays equal
attention to the individual way each of the billion separate pebbles lie
on a pebble beach. And on all the other beaches. He knows and sustains
the exact placement of every single molecule of frozen carbon dioxide in
the northern polar cap of Mars. And of every other molecule of every
other planet, around every other star. The lot. For every unselected
speck of existence, patient shining.
Kings and caliphs, emperors and popes,
televangelists and household bullies have all wanted to claim that their
authority is a licensed copy of its universal reach, but their claim
must always be incomplete at best. In the end, their power and His are
unlike. Their power is rivalrous, in the economic sense. It is big
because others’ power is small. It needs to be extracted from the
submission of other apes like themselves. But His power needs nothing,
competes with nothing, compels nothing, exists at nothing’s expense. You
could no more be humiliated by Him (Her, It) than you could by the
height of the Himalayas or the depth of the Atlantic or the number of
oxygen atoms in the air. It may make sense to compare Him to a king, if a
king is your best local image of unparalleled majesty, but even if He
is like a king, kings are not like Him.* He is more than any king. He is
as common as the air. He is the ordinary ground. And yet a presence.
And yet a person.
... the bastard does exist, if the God of
everything is shining patiently in every room, then you can’t escape the
truth that He must be shining in some horrible places. He must be
lending his uncritical sustaining power to rooms in which the vilest
things are happening. There He must be, obligingly maintaining the flow
of electrons through the rusty wires that are conducting 240 volts into
the soft tissue of some poor screaming soul in a torture chamber. There
He must be, benignly silent, as a migrant worker is raped at a truck
stop. There He must be, shining contentedly away, in the overrun
emergency room where the children from a crushed school bus are dying.
And when you’ve noticed that you’re ready for the next act in the
emotional drama of belief we’re following here.* Which is, of course,
horrified disgust.
[if one believes in] the absence of God, of course, there’s still
pain. But there’s no problem. It’s just what happens. Once the God of
everything is there in the picture, and the physics and biology and
history of the world we know become in some ultimate sense His
responsibility, the lack of love and protection in the order of things
begins to shriek
the lesson ‘all school-children learn’,
according to W. H. Auden: Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.
Suffering doesn’t on the whole ennoble us. Usually it debases and
distorts us, turning us more than ever into creatures who want to pay
harms back to someone. Checked against the knowledge of schoolchildren,
the theodicy fails.
God of everything who loved us would have to
behave as love requires, and allow us to belong fully to ourselves, and
therefore to be free to do unlimited harm. He would have to stand back
helplessly as a parent of an adult child does, thwartedly tender,
twisting His hands in anguish as He refuses to pay our drug debts. But
what about the rest? What about earthquakes, gangrene, supernovas? You
can pull your adult child out of quicksand without threatening their
autonomy. Fail.
My Note:
there is a stronger case to be made and a
criticism of the critique made here. Partly it would be about where you would draw
the interventonary line and partly about autonomy not being simply
human. On drawing the line: it seems to me that if this becomes an argument for more divine intervention, then it becomes hard for interventions not to be justified -until the whole world would be overtaken by exceptions and moral freedom disappeared. Autonomy may need to be recognised to be about the 'freedom' of matter and energy which may be the bedrock of valued human capabilities such as love and freedom ... not saying these are last words, just that there is more to be taken in.
We suffer, but it doesn’t matter, because it’s
only a momentary prelude to heaven. Dear oh dear; give me strength. A
comprehensive and instant fail, this time, because whether or not you
believe that heaven is real, this life certainly is, and so is the
suffering it contains. You can’t deal with the problem by ignoring it.
My Note:
this seems to be Julian of Norwich's position.and I wonder if it might be stronger than here credited.
Julian's vision and understanding of it seem to hold out the possibility that the joys of Ultimate Union with God might in the End prove to be more weighty than they may feel in the here and now: "All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of thing shall be well".
How could the God of everything, the creator
who precedes and sustains all nature, whose love song summons nature
into existence, produce something defective?
problem. ‘How can God permit suffering?’ has
become ‘How can God permit a universe that permits suffering?’ The
problem doesn’t vanish, it merely relocates, it merely moves back a
step.
... makes immediate, intuitive emotional sense to
see the universe around us as being ‘fallen’, but then we find we
haven’t got a Fall. The plausibility and comprehensibility of any
candidate vision seem to be inversely related.
you just howl, and kick as hard as you can at
the imagined ankles of the God of everything, for it is one of His
functions, and one of the ways in which He’s parent-like, to be the
indestructible target for our rage and sorrow, still there, still
loving, whatever we say to Him. The element of useful truth in this last
and best of theodicies is the reminder it contains that the creation is
not the same as the creator.
anyone inclined to think, in a happy wafty muddly way, that nature is God, nature replies: have a cup of pus, Mystic Boy.
The work of reading the geological record, and
thereby exploding the Genesis chronology, was for the most part done not
by anti-Christian refuseniks but by scientists and philosophers
thinking their way onward from starting-points within the religious
culture of the time. Once it became clear that truth lay elsewhere than
in Genesis, religious opinion on the whole moved with impressive
swiftness to accommodate the discovery.
there’s a good case to be made that the ready
acceptance of evolution in Britain owed a lot to the great cultural
transmission mechanism of the Church of England. If you’re glad that
Darwin is on the £10 note, hug an Anglican.
Even if, impossibly, some true and sufficient
explanation could be given you, it wouldn’t help, any more than the
inadequate and defective explanations help you, whether they are
picture-book simple or inscrutably contorted. The only comfort that can
do anything – and probably the most it can do is help you to endure, or
if you cannot endure to fail and fold without wholly hating yourself –
is the comfort of feeling yourself loved.
This is the story we have instead of an
argument, and it is important that it is a story, making a story-like
sense, and having a story’s chance to move us, with human stuff
organised into a tellable pattern in time. But while a story is not the
same thing as a lie, there are stories and stories.
For them, the usual deal the empire offers –
obey, pay our taxes, and you’re welcome to pour your culture into the
vast blend of ours – doesn’t work. For them, it has no upside. They
don’t want the one God found a junior spot among the gods of Dental
Health, Matching Curtains and Being Well Endowed. They don’t want Him
blended. Blending would be adulteration. Or, in fact, adultery. Their
prophets have told them over and over again how unfaithful they are,
what a bunch of wandering-eyed wife-swappers and sluts they are in
relation to their ever-committed God,
there’s a huge collective impurity the law
cannot tell them how to remove: the occupation itself. The empire and
its filthy gods encroach. Tourists wander into holy places, chattering
and laughing. The empire’s money with its blasphemous pictures has to be
used for buying innocent, ordinary bread. It’s as if the people of the
province are being kept forcibly dirty, all the time. Somehow, they
think, the favour of God has been forfeited. For some reason, they are
being punished
he seems weirdly unbothered about sex. Except
to make it clear that it falls under the umbrella of his perfectionism,
he hardly has a thing to say about it. He expresses no opinions
whatsoever about homosexuality, abortion, promiscuity, contraception,
clerical celibacy, virginity at marriage, modest dress, non-procreative
sex, masturbation, gay marriage, or how far you should go on a first
date. He appears to be opposed to divorce on the pro-feminist grounds
that it cuts women off without economic support. (In his world, men can
divorce women but not the other way round.) He does not denounce
anything. He does not seem to be disgusted by anybody, anybody at all.
It is as if, shockingly, what we do in bed is not specially important to
him. As if it just does not constitute for him a particularly prominent
and anxious category of human behaviour.
The law says that everyone should get what
they deserve, but God already knows what we deserve with terrible
precision, and He wants us to have more than that. He
Even in argument, even practising neat
word-judo on a heckler with an agenda, he appears to be fully focused on
the particular individual in front of him. When he offends a rich
person by advising them to dump their possessions, he does not say it to
push them away; it is his real prescription for what afflicts them, and
when they do not take his remedy he is sorry, if unsurprised.
... he will not agree that hope is gone
beyond recall. Wreckage may be written into the logic of the world, but
he will not agree that it is all there is. He says, more can be mended
than you fear. Far more can be mended than you know.
And he himself, existing in the domain of
limits, has limits too. Healing people exhausts him; it makes him sway
on his feet. Day after day ends with him helplessly asking his friends
to get him away, and they carry him off in a boat, or up into the hills,
just so he can sleep, leaving behind the vast total of the world’s
suffering almost unaltered, only the tiniest inroads made into it, only
an infinitesimal fraction of it eased
And since, as well as being a weak and
frightened man, he’s also the love that makes the world, to whom all
times and places are equally present, he isn’t just feeling the anger
and spite and unbearable self-disgust of this one crowd on this one
Friday morning in Palestine; he’s turning his bruised face toward the
whole human crowd, past and present and to come, and accepting
everything we have to throw at him, everything we fear we deserve
ourselves. The doors of his heart are wedged open wide, and in rushes
the whole pestilential flood, the vile and roiling tide of cruelties and
failures and secrets. Let me take that from you, he is saying. Give
that to me instead. Let me carry it. Let me be to blame instead. I am
big enough. I am wide enough. I am not what you were told. I am not your
king or your judge. I am the father who longs for every last one of his
children. I am the friend who will never leave you. I am the light
behind the darkness. I am the shining your shame cannot extinguish. I am
the ghost of love in the torture chamber. I am change and hope. I am
the refining fire. I am the door where you thought there was only wall. I
am what comes after deserving. I am the earth that drinks up the
bloodstain. I am gift without cost. I am. I am. I
He is all open door: to sorrow, suffering,
guilt, despair, horror, everything that cannot be escaped, and he does
not even try to escape it, he turns to meet it, and claims it all as his
own. This is mine now, he is saying; and he embraces it with all that
is left in him, each dark act, each dripping memory, as if it were
something precious, as if it were itself the loved child tottering
homeward on the road. But there is so much of it. So many injured
children; so many locked rooms; so much lonely anger; so many bombs in
public places; so much vicious zeal; so many bored teenagers at
roadblocks; so many drunk girls at parties someone thought they could
have a little fun with; so many jokes that go too far; so much ruining
greed; so much sick ingenuity; so much burned skin. The world he claims,
claims him. It burns and stings, it splinters and gouges, it locks him
round and drags him down.
He’s so deep down now in the geology of woe,
so buried beneath the mountains’ weight of it, that the pressure is
squeezing out his feeling for the light. There’s nothing left of it for
him but a speck, a pinpoint the world grinds in on itself, a dot dimming
as the strata of the dark are piled heavier and heavier on it. And then
it goes out. Of course it does. Love can’t repair death. Death is
stronger than love. We all know that. But Yeshua didn’t, until now. This
is the first time in his entire life he’s ever felt alone. Now there is
no love song. There is no kind father. There is just a man on a cross,
dying in pain; a foolish man who chose to give up life and breath to be a
carcass on a pole. The yellow walls of the city blur with Yeshua’s
tears, and he opens his mouth and howls the news – new only to him –
that we are abandoned in a dark place where help never comes
[the NT] letters, do have an absolutely definite set of
convictions about him that they are casting around for adequate words
to express. That Jesus’s actions in the world were God’s own actions in
the world; that where Jesus was present, God was directly present too;
that his death and return from death were an initiative by God to take
from humanity the weight of guilt and shame and disgust, and to show us a
life larger than law. This cluster of propositions is Christianity’s
first layer of organised words and understandings. It, not the
biographies, is the foundation. Which means that the strange God/man
mixture is there in the foundation. It may not be true, it may still be a
piece of after-the-event fabrication or misunderstanding, but it is not
an addition to the story. It is, itself, the thing the story is
struggling to report
When the Gospel stories started to be written,
Jerusalem was already a ruin and the temple was rubble; the province’s
countryside was beginning to be ethnically cleansed. The landscape of
small towns and small-town synagogues, populated by yearning, fearful,
angry people, was ceasing to exist. The Gospel writers were recreating a
lost place and time when they described Jesus’s journeys fifty, sixty,
seventy years earlier. The interpretation was always fused with the
events
The Jesus of the orthodox story treats people
with deep attention even when angry. Their Jesus zaps people with his
divine superpowers if they irritate him. Orthodox Jesus says that
everyone needs the love of God, and God loves everyone. Their Jesus has
an inner circle you can be admitted to if you collect enough crisp
packets. Orthodox Jesus likes wine, parties, and grilled fish for
breakfast. Their Jesus thinks that human flesh and its appetites are
icky. Orthodox Jesus is disconcertingly unbothered about sexuality, and
conducts his own sexual life, if he has one, off the page. Their Jesus
can generate women to have sex with out of his own ribs, in a way that
suggests the author had trouble talking to girls. Orthodox Jesus says,
‘Don’t be afraid. I am always with you.’ The Jesus of these documents
says, ‘Advance, Blue Adept, to the 17th Jade Portal of Amazingness, and
give the secret signal with your thumbs.’* Read much of the rival
‘gospels’, and you start to think that the Church Fathers who decided
what went into the New Testament had one of the easiest editorial jobs
on record. It wasn’t a question of suppression or exclusion, so much as
of seeing what did and didn’t belong inside the bounds of a basically
coherent story.
To have a creator who becomes a creature mixes
up the conceptual layers of ordinary reality. It pokes a hole in
reality and pulls some of the background through to form a lovely
rosette;
the Christian move of giving God a human body literally messes with holiness, at least as the other two monotheisms define
the God/man mixture in Jesus brings us
something more precious than conceptual purity: hope in trouble,
consolation in suffering, help in anguish. It brings us a way out of the
far worse and more destructive paradoxes of theodicy
It’s a common mythological move, a cultural
basic, an anthropological golden oldie. Transcendent power goes down
into the dark and allows itself to be extinguished, but then returns all
the stronger, having incorporated into itself the strength of the
opposing principle. A frequent Christian response, when this is pointed
out, is to argue that all the other stories are foreshadowings or echoes
of ours, which happens to be the one true story. But this, to me, seems
rather obviously to set the big red Special Pleading alarm flashing,
and to sound the klaxon of bullshit. I think a better answer is just to
agree that universal is universal is universal. Everybody dies;
everybody tells stories about gods; everybody is going to try, at some
point, to make story-sense of death by subjecting one of the lustrous
figures of the gods to it. The usual point of gods is that they’re
immortal, which will make the death of one of them bring out all the
more fiercely the existential scandal which is our own death. Gods, in
anthropological terms, are where we put in concentrated form our sense
of what our own being, our own aliveness, is. A god dies: being
encounters non-being. Everyone sits up in their seats and leans forward,
because the drama is our own. So perhaps that’s what Christianity is,
the traditional god-dies theme being installed for the God of
everything? If so, then the story I’ve just told is a myth. We can
categorise Jesus’s adventures as forming an imaginative pattern like the
pattern of the story of Odin, one whose function is to embody a deep
piece of human meaning-discovery. One which is true (or maybe ‘true’) so
far as it embodies true perception, rather than because it corresponds
to any actual event.
it does not read like a myth. It’s the wrong
shape, in a number of different ways. For a start, it doesn’t happen in
the special time set aside for myths, the dream-time, the long-ago zone
off to the side of calendar history where gods and heroes strutted their
stuff. What year was it when Odin hung on the tree? The question does
not compute. It’s a category error, like asking what colour accountancy
is. Jesus’s story, by contrast, happens at a definite historical
address.
In myth, our ordinary preoccupations get
projected outwards in extraordinary form. They’re amplified into
fantasy. Here, what is emphatically not our view of the world, not our
set of natural priorities, not us, breaks inward into the world of our
ordinary experience, and dwells among us, ‘full of grace and truth’.
Instead of surging about looking superlative, as mythic heroes are prone
to do, flexing enormous muscles or giving smiles of groin-melting
beauty, Jesus does his best to complicate and perturb any worshipful
reactions he might get, by asking awkward questions. ‘Why do you call me
good?’ ‘Who do you say that I am?’ It may be normal for us as human
beings to be worshipful, deferring to those in our local troupe of
primates we perceive as being grander, stronger, wiser, braver, more
glamorous than us; but Jesus, who in the Christian view is the one
person who fully deserves worship, goes out of his way to demonstrate
that he does not need it. We’re back at the non-rivalrous majesty of the
creator. Jesus is not in the business of competing for our admiration,
or for anything else. Nothing he has or is, in the story, is extracted
from other people’s reactions to him. He shows us a vision of the good
which does not ask us to bow down – though we may want to – but, over
and over again, to stand up. (And to take the bed with us.)
can’t just say, this story contains physical
impossibilities (miracles, resurrection from the dead) and thus a priori
must be counted among the impossible things a rational person shouldn’t
believe before breakfast. That is to assume the untruth of the story’s
own contention that there is a maker of nature who, this once, was able
to alter nature’s normal operations. In other words, the argument from
impossibility depends on a faith position adopted beforehand, which
rather reduces its logical grip on the world.
finding counterpart outrages all the way to the
point, two thousand years ago, when the memory of Jesus was first
organised into the thing called ‘the church’.
just about inexplicable that, given all the bad
stuff, Christians nevertheless believe that our church is something
precious. Unless, of course, we secretly approve of the bad stuff.
Unless in our heart of hearts we’re actually in favour of massacre and
prejudice and exclusion.
we aren’t specially. We’re only as darkly susceptible to that stuff as everyone else is.
could talk, for instance, about the invention of kindness as an ideal of behaviour to rival honour or dominance or stoicism.
emphasis on people being loveable to God
irrespective of what they deserve laid the groundwork for the idea of
there being rights owed to people irrespective of their status, their
behaviour, their capabilities.
theology that the reasons for widening the
circle were found. Only the Christian world was wicked enough to
practise slavery in its bulk, industrialised, plantation-labour form,
but once Christians decided against it, it was largely in imitation that
the rest of the world started to reject it in its domestic, small-scale
form. Slavery was abolished in Saudi Arabia, for example, in 1962.
Note:
though I seem to recall sugar plantation slavery mentioned in a history book I once read, in what is now Iraq under the caliplhate ...
what people are is sculptable as well as
scripted, we’re creatures of chance and circumstance (and grace) as well
as of our biology.
People, given an institution to play with,
turn it into a pecking order, a tool for personal power, an arena for
politicking, an opportunity for spite, a capturable reservoir of rent
and loot.
Christianity as the great gratuitous cause of
all our sorrows, I mainly think: read more history, mate. Look at the
vast record of conflict generated in every society that ever signed up
for the opportunities and the costs of being more organised than
hunter-gatherers.
Without pernicious Christianity we’d all be
grouped round the white piano with John and Yoko. Yeah, right. The
patterns of human bad behaviour are far wider and more ancient. I won’t,
myself, be convinced that the bloody wars Christians have fought over
points of theology are uniquely the fault of the religion rather than of
the species in general, unless someone can point out to me a
non-Christian area of the planet, with reasonable population density and
enough wealth to underwrite weapons production, where they don’t invest
their spare time in butchery for the ostensible sake of ideas. If not
ideas about religion, then points of economic theory,
There hasn’t quite been a war about evolutionary
biology yet, but the brew of bad ideas in Nazism certainly drew on
turn-of-the-twentieth-century speculations about racial difference
which people at the time thought were Darwinian
make it a story about a special shiny person,
whose side we’re all on as we listen, being abused by especially evil
persons. Then what’s wrong in the story is no longer that Jesus is being
crucified, it’s that Jesus is being crucified, lovely innocent Jesus.
And, comfortably directed outwards, pity turns to anger, and anger turns
to hate.
He also didn’t mean: go out, my dears, and hurt
yourselves. But it is possible to read it that way, as a suggestion that
we should embrace suffering by being enthusiastic about it, and there
is a strand of self-directed violence in Christian history as a result,
often committed by people who have a troubled or frightened relationship
with their bodies anyway, and who are looking for a sanction to act on
it.
Monasteries, I’m glad to say, are full of
hedonists. If this seems self-contradictory to you, then I would suggest
you need to broaden your knowledge of human satisfactions.
the love really never stops, if God really
does long for every lost soul, then in principle God regards as
forgivable a whole load of stuff we really don’t want forgiven, thank
you.
God is apparently ready to rush right in there
and give them all a hug, the bastard. We don’t want that. We want
justice, dammit, if not in this world then in the next. We want God’s
extra-niceness confined to deserving cases such as, for example, us, and
a reliable process of judgement put in place which will ensure that the
child-murderers are ripped apart with red-hot tongs.
There is a characteristic and persistent Christian failure where power is concerned, but it’s much more specific
The church’s portfolio is valued in the (low)
billions, but that’s because it operates on a very large scale.
Disaggregate the billions, and you find that on a local level the
reality everywhere is one of penny-pinching, and continuous fund-raising
just to keep the roof on the thousands of ancient churches. It takes
all the running we can do to stay in the same place. It’s not as if the
assets could be liquidated, anyway. They aren’t being held for their
cash value, and they don’t belong to us to dispose of. The purpose of
the church’s money is not to make money, but to contrive for it to go on
being true that the church is there whenever it is needed.
In the unlikely event that a heartbroken
Richard Dawkins wants help with his HPtFtU, there will be somebody tired
but willing in North Oxford whose responsibility it is to offer him an
inexpensive digestive biscuit and a cup of milky tea, and to listen to
him for as long as it takes.
though Christianity will function, more or less,
as an ideology of power, it never does so easily and conveniently, like
the law-giving religions. It never does so without an awkward residue
being left over. You can tell the gospel as a story about authority, if
you choose to
but then what do you do with the insistence
that God sees the world upside down, from the vantage point of failure,
from our gutters not our palaces? What do you do with His endless alarm
about loss, and His indifference to possession? What do you do about
Christ’s preference for having dinner with the rogues and the screw-ups
and the enemies of public order? No matter how hunky-dory the
authorities of some supposedly Christian set-up declare things to be,
the church is always nurturing the seeds of a critique. We can’t help
it. The critique is always there in the story, and as we value the
story, we have to keep the critique of power available.
the source of the general pattern of sorrow
power has created in Christian history, is not power itself, but
confidence about power. Certainty about power. Optimism about power, of a
kind that contradicts Jesus’s grimly kind lack of faith in our chances
of managing righteousness. We are supposed to believe that human
attempts at perfection will mean a nice slab on top, worms underneath;
but it is possible, with a bit of squinting, to imagine that because
we’re Christians, our projects might somehow share in God’s freedom from
the HPtFtU. Then power, rather than being just another medium in which
we’re sure to struggle and blunder as we try to articulate the vision of
grace, might itself be sanctified. Christian power might be holy, and
be exercised successfully for holy purposes, without irony, without
humility, without doubt.
recurring tendency to give religious sanction to
whatever is small-‘c’ conservative in a society, at the expense of
everybody who falls outside the conservative definition of what’s good
and natural.
Then whatever is inside the tribal boundary
begins to seem good because it is inside, and whatever is outside begins
to seem wicked because it is outside. This produces a moral map of the
world where virtue is determined by labels rather than by actions: by
what your label says you are, not by what you do. Given the universality
of the HPtFtU, it follows that a lot of everyday spite and
unpleasantness, and worse, is going to go on under the label of
insiderish goodness, and may well be given cover, consciously or
unconsciously, by other insiders who believe that they are defending the
dignity of the Christian label. Or even that they are defending
goodness itself – which is the same thing, according to the
insider/outsider map. If
Sexual sins matter, all right – where selves
touch so closely, what more fertile field could there be for the HPtFtU?
– but any of us can commit them, and we usually do, taking hold of each
other coldly, carelessly, mockingly, exploitatively, angrily, as if the
other or our own self were a convenient object rather than flesh
requiring our recognition and our tenderness.
It’s been a swift, epochal social change. And
because the church has been slow to participate in it, and was committed
before it (with only a very few exceptions) to the pre-feminist and
pre-Stonewall understanding of what was right ’n’ proper, many people
now assume that the church must be bigoted on principle. They presume
that the bigoted world of the past was bigoted because the church then
had the power to enforce its bigoted principle, and is no longer bigoted
because the church has lost the power to impose it. Surely the
Christian scriptures must contain somewhere the announcement that the
Westboro Baptist Church puts on its delightful placards, God Hates Fags.
Obviously, they think, mainstream churchy types are a bit more
circumspect about expressing it than the Westboro nutcases, seeing that
it doesn’t go down very well these days, but just look at the news, just
look at the way the churches writhe and cringe when they’re asked to
follow the equality laws. It’s the same thing. The Bible teaches hate.
They try to hide it now, but it’s too late; that old tyrannical
pleasure-prohibiting stuff has lost its grip on us. We’re off to dance
the night away at the roller-disco, daddy-o, wearing hotpants and
smooching whom we please, and you can’t stop us, you sad old religious
nobodies. We’re free! Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty
we’re free at last. (Whoops, wrong liberation struggle.)
There will always be more change needed. There
always has been more change needed. The process is never-ending. For
ever and ever, in any possible future, the church will always be
adjusting imperfectly to new times, and then un-adjusting again later,
also imperfectly, with occasional lucky breaks where grace, crackling
onwards through history, helps us to a sudden generosity. The church
will always be clumsy and time-lagged and complicit in the corruptions
of its times.
towards Skull Hill, and the human body on the
cross there. We aren’t just eating Jesus. We’re eating his death. We eat
and we drink because we desire monstrosity’s end, but the sacrament
carries us into the monstrous, through the monstrous, to get us there,
just as the story we tell only arrives at hope by way of tragedy. The
meanings of the bread and the wine line up along a bloody corridor, as
barbarous as the barbarous world God is working on, and at the end of
the corridor, once we have accepted the strange and frightening gift we
are being given, there is forgiveness. We eat the bread, we drink the
wine, to be joined to the act by which forgiveness came. We eat the end
of cruelty and shame. We eat amnesty for whatever the particular load of
the HPtFtU was that we brought to the dinner table. We eat the
rejoicing that this one time, in spite of all sorrow, the world’s weight
was flipped over and turned to joy. We eat grace. And that’s what the
church is for
Grace makes us better readers of each other
Saying the same prayers again and again,
pacing your body again and again through the set movements of faith,
somehow helps keep the door ajar through which He may come. The words
may strike you as ecclesiastical blah nine times in ten, or ninety-nine
times in a hundred, and then be transformed, and then have the huge
fresh wind blowing through them into your little closed room. And
meanwhile you make faith your vantage point, your habitual place to
stand. And you get used to the way the human landscape looks from there:
reoriented, reorganised, different.
The existence of goodness is not in doubt from
the Christian point of view: it’s just that we think that you’re likely
to have to take a turn, in time, at being the puke-stained other
brother. And yes, of course you can be ‘good without God’. I suppose
from a philosophical point of view Christians tend to believe that all
successful goodness is a remote reflection of God’s.
is observable that a surprisingly large number
of believers are to be found among those who volunteer to work with the
dying, the demented, the addicted, the institutionalised and the very
impaired and afflicted, where the best that can be done is to love for
the sake of it, and to keep sorrow company.
I don’t expect the religion ever to be any
less ramshackle, in my time, where I live. And that’s all right. For
sure, it would be nice if people weren’t quite so rude. It would be nice
if they didn’t brandish crude cartoons of nineteenth-century thought as
the very latest thing in philosophy, and expect you to reel back,
dazzled. It would be nice not to be patronised by nitwits. It would be
nice if people were to understand that science is a special exercise in
perceiving the world without metaphor, and that, powerful though it is,
it doesn’t function as a guide to those very large aspects of experience
that can’t be perceived except through metaphor. It would be nice if
people saw that the world cannot be disenchanted, and that the choice
before us is really a choice of enchantments.
What I do know is that, when I am lucky, when I
have managed to pay attention, when for once I have hushed my noise for
a little while, it can feel as if there is one. And so it makes
emotional sense to proceed as if He’s there; to dare the conditional.
And not timid death-fearing emotional sense, or cowering craven
master-seeking sense, or censorious holier-than-thou sense, either.
Hopeful sense. Realistic sense. Battered-about-but-still-trying sense.
The sense recommended by our awkward sky fairy, who says: don’t be
careful. Don’t be surprised by any human cruelty. But don’t be afraid.
Far more can be mended than you know
