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"Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense by Francis Spufford – review
Richard Holloway commends a dispatch from the frontline of religion v atheism
Can anything new be written about religion? Probably not, but because religion continues to be such an important and contentious part of human experience it is worth reminding ourselves of the terrain that has been fought over for centuries; and the fact that we slip so easily into the metaphor of warfare when thinking about the subject should alert us to the interminable and inconclusive nature of the debate.
Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense
by Francis Spufford
As the world knows, the most recent round of hostilities in the religious wars was provoked by the "Four Horsemen of the New Atheism" – Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens – in a series of bestselling books that called for the unconditional surrender of religion to the superior power, morally and intellectually, of scientific rationality. While Christianity has been one of the targets of this campaign, perhaps the real enemy of the New Atheists is what has been described as "post-9/11 Islamofascism". But even if that's what's really going on, the New Atheists have a tendency to bundle up all expressions of religion in the same ugly blanket before throwing it off a cliff. Intriguingly, atheism itself, particularly British atheism, is showing itself to be a broad church, which is why thinkers such as John Gray are highly critical of the carpet-bombing strategy adopted by the Four Horsemen. So what's it all about?
It's about us, the human animal, the strange amphibious creature that swims in nature yet is afflicted with a capacity for reflection that transcends nature. Not all humans suffer from the addiction, of course, but down the ages enough of us have been so addicted to asking what the universe means that we have given rise to the three great enterprises of science, philosophy and religion. And even if you leave God out of the debate, or even if you have taken leave of God completely, we humans remain a problem to ourselves.
One current version of the problem is reflected in the debate about the difference between the brain and the mind. The two are obviously commensurate in one sense, but is there something else happening that cannot be captured in a read-out of brainwaves? Had the technology been available at the time, it would have been possible to wire up Edward Elgar to a neurological measurement device when he was composing his cello concerto and get a reading of what was going on in his brain at the time. In fact, it would have given us everything we needed to know except the mystery of the music itself. I hasten to add here that I do not think we can immediately jump from this puzzle into a full-blown metaphysic, but it does prompt us to acknowledge the strangeness of the universe and our place within it.
For functionalists, of course, the neurological read-out gives us everything there is; but many of us are not so sure. And we go on to apply the same uncertainty to the universe itself. We know science gives us as accurate a reading as it can of the way things function, but the picture it presents leaves some of us with a kind of resonant absence – and it is this sense of an absence that religion tries to explain. And the different shades of religion are almost infinitely nuanced. They go from the high purple certainty of confident theism right over to a very pale grey that looks like atheism because it does not believe that human vocabulary can encompass the nature of ultimate reality. And since none of us can get off the universe to command the view from nowhere that might resolve the puzzle once and for all, we are caught, as Matthew Arnold expressed it, "… as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night."
And from time to time messengers come to us from the front of the religious wars. They rarely give us news of ground permanently won or utterly lost, but they do bring us stories of what the struggle feels like; and in the process a new kind of reportage is being crafted – the religious or anti-religious memoir. These stories from the darkling plain have the attraction that all first-person narratives have: they give us the feel of the conflict and the cost to the individual of waging it. In his new book, Francis Spufford has made a significant contribution to the genre.
He tells us that he did no research for the book and wrote at least some of it rapidly in a Cambridge coffee shop. This is probably why it has such a raw, unedited, in-your-face quality. He probably knows that some of it won't stand up to forensic examination by either scholarly believers or scholarly atheists, but that is unlikely to bother him. What he has set out to do is describe what it feels like to go on believing when you know and have experienced all that can be said against faith; and when you share the disgust of the New Atheists at religion's abuses and cruelties, yet you hold on because you'd rather be inside than outside the confused muddle that religion undoubtedly is. He is at his best when talking about human sin and failure, which he calls HPtFtu – "the human propensity to fuck things up". He is honest about his own fuck-ups and the forgiveness that followed, which is why he believes Christianity, with its doctrine of unconditional acceptance, makes emotional sense. As he puts it: the grief we ourselves cause can be mended.
He is also good at describing what it feels like to sit silently in front of the resonant absence and feel beckoned beyond it. This is not a book about religious theory; it is a record of religious experience. Like the rest of us, he doesn't know if there is a god. "And neither do you, and neither does Richard bloody Dawkins, and neither does anyone. It not being a knowable item. 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 conditionality." His book itself is an act of daring, a message from the frontline of an old and bruising war.
• Richard Holloway's Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt, is published by Canongate."
_http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/sep/14/unapologetic-christianity-francis-spufford-review
Richard Holloway commends a dispatch from the frontline of religion v atheism
Can anything new be written about religion? Probably not, but because religion continues to be such an important and contentious part of human experience it is worth reminding ourselves of the terrain that has been fought over for centuries; and the fact that we slip so easily into the metaphor of warfare when thinking about the subject should alert us to the interminable and inconclusive nature of the debate.
Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense
by Francis Spufford
As the world knows, the most recent round of hostilities in the religious wars was provoked by the "Four Horsemen of the New Atheism" – Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens – in a series of bestselling books that called for the unconditional surrender of religion to the superior power, morally and intellectually, of scientific rationality. While Christianity has been one of the targets of this campaign, perhaps the real enemy of the New Atheists is what has been described as "post-9/11 Islamofascism". But even if that's what's really going on, the New Atheists have a tendency to bundle up all expressions of religion in the same ugly blanket before throwing it off a cliff. Intriguingly, atheism itself, particularly British atheism, is showing itself to be a broad church, which is why thinkers such as John Gray are highly critical of the carpet-bombing strategy adopted by the Four Horsemen. So what's it all about?
It's about us, the human animal, the strange amphibious creature that swims in nature yet is afflicted with a capacity for reflection that transcends nature. Not all humans suffer from the addiction, of course, but down the ages enough of us have been so addicted to asking what the universe means that we have given rise to the three great enterprises of science, philosophy and religion. And even if you leave God out of the debate, or even if you have taken leave of God completely, we humans remain a problem to ourselves.
One current version of the problem is reflected in the debate about the difference between the brain and the mind. The two are obviously commensurate in one sense, but is there something else happening that cannot be captured in a read-out of brainwaves? Had the technology been available at the time, it would have been possible to wire up Edward Elgar to a neurological measurement device when he was composing his cello concerto and get a reading of what was going on in his brain at the time. In fact, it would have given us everything we needed to know except the mystery of the music itself. I hasten to add here that I do not think we can immediately jump from this puzzle into a full-blown metaphysic, but it does prompt us to acknowledge the strangeness of the universe and our place within it.
For functionalists, of course, the neurological read-out gives us everything there is; but many of us are not so sure. And we go on to apply the same uncertainty to the universe itself. We know science gives us as accurate a reading as it can of the way things function, but the picture it presents leaves some of us with a kind of resonant absence – and it is this sense of an absence that religion tries to explain. And the different shades of religion are almost infinitely nuanced. They go from the high purple certainty of confident theism right over to a very pale grey that looks like atheism because it does not believe that human vocabulary can encompass the nature of ultimate reality. And since none of us can get off the universe to command the view from nowhere that might resolve the puzzle once and for all, we are caught, as Matthew Arnold expressed it, "… as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night."
And from time to time messengers come to us from the front of the religious wars. They rarely give us news of ground permanently won or utterly lost, but they do bring us stories of what the struggle feels like; and in the process a new kind of reportage is being crafted – the religious or anti-religious memoir. These stories from the darkling plain have the attraction that all first-person narratives have: they give us the feel of the conflict and the cost to the individual of waging it. In his new book, Francis Spufford has made a significant contribution to the genre.
He tells us that he did no research for the book and wrote at least some of it rapidly in a Cambridge coffee shop. This is probably why it has such a raw, unedited, in-your-face quality. He probably knows that some of it won't stand up to forensic examination by either scholarly believers or scholarly atheists, but that is unlikely to bother him. What he has set out to do is describe what it feels like to go on believing when you know and have experienced all that can be said against faith; and when you share the disgust of the New Atheists at religion's abuses and cruelties, yet you hold on because you'd rather be inside than outside the confused muddle that religion undoubtedly is. He is at his best when talking about human sin and failure, which he calls HPtFtu – "the human propensity to fuck things up". He is honest about his own fuck-ups and the forgiveness that followed, which is why he believes Christianity, with its doctrine of unconditional acceptance, makes emotional sense. As he puts it: the grief we ourselves cause can be mended.
He is also good at describing what it feels like to sit silently in front of the resonant absence and feel beckoned beyond it. This is not a book about religious theory; it is a record of religious experience. Like the rest of us, he doesn't know if there is a god. "And neither do you, and neither does Richard bloody Dawkins, and neither does anyone. It not being a knowable item. 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 conditionality." His book itself is an act of daring, a message from the frontline of an old and bruising war.
• Richard Holloway's Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt, is published by Canongate."
_http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/sep/14/unapologetic-christianity-francis-spufford-review
