An Article of Faith

Christians, I find, are the most tolerant of people. Only last Saturday they were on my doorstep, where we enjoyed some friendly conversation. It was a quite wonderful twenty minutes.

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The tea is on the table. Picking up the TLS I turn to Joan… Bringggggg! Throwing her down - she squeals and calls me a ****** - I jump up and stride to the front door. Two smiles shine into my face. Under the muted orange of a woolly hat a stranger says:

Hallo, we would like to read this passage to you.

They point to a leaflet, and my soul empties. Do I really want to listen to this anorexic paragraph when the book, in all its obesity, is upstairs? I feel cramped up suddenly. The world too rich to be squeezed into the poverty of a simple pamphlet.

Schloss: It’s ok; I…I…

I wonder what to do. I think of closing the conversation down; but, and this happens every time, a door-stepper will say something that wrestles my attention; and so I grapple with a phrase, which pulls me into talk and argument. I smile to these happy welcoming faces; then speak two pages of prose on myth. I mention faith…

Eve: knowledge is faith.

Schloss: I disagree. Think of Dawkins. I smile, and we all nod in mutual agreement. We know we know. His mistake is to reduce Christianity to knowledge and reason. But that won’t do! The man’s a fool of course, and a believer too, in science, it is his religion; we all have one. But no; to believe we must make a leap of faith that takes us beyond what can possibly be known. It is faith not knowledge that makes a Christian.

Eve: Do you think so? Surely knowledge is in the Bible. What we need…

Schloss: Well, as you know, the Bible is a library. And as such it has a range of knowledges. Think of the Old Testament and the New: a different God in each…

Eve: The father brought his child to redeem…

Schloss: Yes, if you have…

She smiles: faith. 

I smile too. Mary watches me closely from the side.

Schloss: We all have faith. Dawkins has a faith. So do I. Today we all believe in Freedom, Democracy and the Individual. These too are myths to get us through the day. For me no single myth can suffice for a lifetime. Myths are contingent, and will change. I don’t believe that a god, in whatever shape or form, actually exists out there in the heavens. God exists, of course of course he does; but he is a human creation; it is we who make him. It’s why I can’t have an absolute faith in his existence. But something worries me deeply about all of this. A natural human trait is to make moral judgements. We do it every day. It is a terrible and dangerous weakness, which self-consciously sets us apart from others, so that we habitually condemn those different from ourselves. Now religion, with its faith in the one big universal Truth, encourages this natural human tendency for moral egoism; our self-righteous desire to judge and chastise. Religions insist, by their nature, on the ideas of inside/outside; civilised/barbarian; sinner and saved. We need to get away from this. We should try not to be moral judges. It can, as you know, lead to horrific consequences; think of the history of the Church.

Mary: Oh yes, I can see that. But religion is different from a church. My family is from a Lutheran background.

And she tells a story about her father and the war and his search for meaning. The local churches, the books he read, including Karl Marx, could not give the answer to his life’s question: why is there war? Then one day a Jehovah Witness knocked on the door and pointed to a page in the Bible. Here was the answer!

Schloss: Well there’s Pascal. He had his famous wager that it was better to believe in the afterlife than not….

I smile, and they both laugh.

Schloss: He wrote a very important book. It is called The Provincial Letters, and it satirises the Catholic Church. Pascal was a Jansenist; a sort of Catholic puritan, and he attacked the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, for what he believed was their doctrinal softness and spiritual corruption. He was a religious ascetic, a member of a sect that was criticising the worldly religious who put the institution, and its material comforts, before the word of god. His satire, wonderful in itself, is an example, I think, of the cyclical nature of all religions; the book alerting us to how they grow and change; moving from a sect - where the members both believe in and live the ideas - to a church, which seeks to accommodate the faith to the society, inevitably compromising the religious ideas, which become divorced from life. It is a natural cycle. As the church grows, there comes a point when it becomes over-extended, weakening the religious spirit. This usually causes a reaction; such as Luther in the Reformation. As you know, in the Reformation a group of believers went to go back to the very beginnings of the faith; they returned to the original Christian source, the Bible itself, and sought to live by its ideas. I think this is what you are doing. The Jehovah Witnesses closer to a sect, to Christ’s original teachings.

I sense a touch of nervousness around that “sect”…

Eve: Yes. And that spirit is in the Bible. All we need to know is in there.

Schloss: But I disagree! There are thousands of books. Look around you! I hold out my arms as if to embrace the house. All of them can help us. There are many many writers who have something to say. We should see life as an endless journey. And there can be no last station stop. I cannot end my trip in the Bible.

Eve: Yes, I see that. 

She smiles.

Eve: Do you believe in the afterlife?

Schloss: We are all animals. We’ll die like animals.

Eve: You look so happy!

They look happy too!

Eve: What is your name.

I tell her. 

Eve: Paul is a good Christian name.

Schloss: Yes! Some would say he is the founder of Christianity! 

I ask, and they tell me theirs.

Schloss: And Mary and Eve are good Christian names too…

We all laugh!

Eve: Thank you for talking to us. We’ll see you again sometime…

I close the door, and worry over not following up that point on myth. I rehearse the argument. Myths, growing out of their time and place, enable communities to survive through socially useful morality tales that both uplift the spirit and bond groups together, and not just through shared beliefs and common stories but by myth’s capacity to pollute the outsider, whose supposed evil makes them untouchable. The polluted cannot influence and therefore corrupt the group. Believers are always saved; the rest are damned, in this life even more than in Hell. Salvation an electric fence that keeps the world at a distance. 

Each place and period has its own myths, which it believes true. Indeed, this belief in truth protects the myth from exposure: we think our fictions reality, which thus go unremarked, untested. Hidden in plain sight! Those supremely confident in the truth of their own reality will attack the beliefs of others as myth - Dawkins sits atop his demolition ball knocking down mosques - while completely overlooking their own fairy tales; thus Dawkins’ belief - live on TV - that science is an absolute moral good; because it saves people. The internal combustion engine and the nuclear bomb clearly the work of magicians and magi… Aargh! the tea is cold. I take the mug to the kitchen, where I boil the kettle.

The God of the Old Testament emerges out of a particular environment; one of small tribes and kingdoms maintaining themselves in a hostile geography, where they must compete against enemies and survive in tension with allies and neutrals. In such terrain a shared faith in some transcendent god binds and fuses these groups together - think of the history of Wahhabism and the desert tribes in the Arabian peninsula - increasing their size and force. Jesus comes later. He arrives in a civilisation that is infinitely larger and more developed; the Roman Empire, having conquered those tribes and kingdoms, now melding them all into an imperial society where the dominant city - Rome - sets the intellectual and moral tone. We’d expect - wouldn’t we? - a religion to arise that reflects the imperial culture; Christianity growing out of the Empire’s conquest not opposed to it (so that centuries later it easily becomes its ruling religion). Using the spoon to squeeze the teabag against the mug’s side… Yes yes, I must go back to The Rise of Western Christendom; I’m sure it’s there that Brown makes the link between the centralisation of the empire and a cosmology that does away with religious intermediaries; this elevation of political control into an imperial deity the moment when the pagan world, with its plethora of local gods, is finally replaced by a monotheistic Christianity. 

Tea in hand I return to Joan. Having waited patiently she welcomes me warmly. Sorry, our talk is private… I get up and lock the study door. What Joan has to say is important, and I want to share it with you. To quote myself, she “shows how the liberal progressivism of a university educated elite is a culture not a truth; suffused with its own bias and prejudice.” Today’s liberals also have their myths they believe real, universal and absolute; the reason for their intolerance, which should concern us greatly; for the liberal, who is the foundation of our civilisation, is apt to turn nasty when obstructed, so bringing that civilisation down. But sorry, you will have wait for Joan, in another post, on some other day. What! The sugar! I scramble up, fight with the lock, and return to the kitchen. Digging out the sugar from the sugar bowl I think back to Eve and Mary…

Eve: Our insights come from God.

Schloss: Think of Socrates, who had an immense influence on Christianity. He was always creating myths and he often spoke of divine insight. Did he believe his god was real? I’m not sure. The evidence I think is ambiguous. My feeling is that he was speaking in metaphors. You see, these are insights are real, but they come from us. We are made to have them.

Joan, I’m coming… Wham! Whoosh! Wham! A MiG fighter plane shoots out of the sky. It’s ok. Be calm, don’t be frightened. This is only a metaphor. An idea has flown into my head, stopping me suddenly spilling my tea… Damn! It’s ok, it’s ok, I won’t be long - Joan is murmuring disconsolately. Looking for the floor cloth I scramble around under the sink. The idea Mr Schloss. Oh, you. You haven’t been around for a while. I know I know; we’ll talk about that later; but the idea, Schloss, you were saying… Craning my neck around in this tight little cupboard I speak over my shoulder. Yes, I was thinking about the idea of insight when that MiG came along. Swissssh! And there it was. Would you Adam and… A little out of place that, don’t you think Schloss? True. Very true. Nevertheless, there was this insight: Christ is the young idealist who rebels against his father. A typical teenage type! Forgetting myself I knock my head on the u-bend. No no, it doesn’t matter. I’m alright. I’m ok, truly. Don’t you see? Come come, you’re never usually as slow as this. Christianity is our ur-myth of youth’s rebellion. Jesus Christ the first of our flower children.

To be continued…