Atheism 2.0

Four years ago, not long after the start of my retirement, I embarked on the intellectual journey (a really hard slog, to be honest) that led to the creation of my two Abrahamica MSS. See my allied sites, which can be found at the "Complete Profile" (sidebar).

I was reacting, if you will, to two things. The first stemmed from my former self. It was embodied in my 35-year career as an art historian, which was largely concerned with religious art (Christian mainly, but also ancient Egyptian). In this teaching I was prepared to set aside my awareness of the manifold confusions and downright evils set in motion by organized religion, especially as embodied in the Abrahamic family of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The bad side of these religions amounted, in effect, to the repellent grain of sand that engendered the pearl.

After I retired, and was no longer obliged to represent the collective mission of my university, I felt empowered to explore, and possibly reject this rationale.

My second dissatisfaction occurred when I read the books of the New Atheists, Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. Their dismissal of religion seemed peremptory and, quite honestly, ignorant. They were tone-deaf to the cultural benefits that I had been exploring in my college lectures and books.

So in my new writing I sought to chart a middle course, guided in large measure by the hard-won findings of the historical-critical school in religious studies.

Now I find that, with his concept of Atheism 2.0, the English writer Alain de Botton has adopted a similar intermediate position, though I fear that it is not very new. In fact he goes back to the idea of Matthew Arnold in the 19th century, who held that as the power of religion receded it would be replaced by culture. According to De Botton, modern education is too much concerned with imparting information and not enough with guidance and consolation--how we should live in short. He rightly points to the deficiencies of the art-for-art's-sake approach that is dominant in our museums. From Masaccio and Michelangelo to Rembrandt and Blake much of the art that we most revere is religious. Ditto, most Renaissance and much of Baroque music. De Botton also points to affinities between pilgrimage and modern travel.

Perhaps I am insufficiently receptive because I had thought of most of these points before. Alain de Botton deserves a hearing. In fact, he makes his case quite eloquently in his recent TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_atheism_2_0.html.

Hitchens love

The tributes have been pouring in for Christopher Hitchens, who has just died of esophageal cancer. I find that I cannot fully share this positive emotion. Not that Hitchens was a bad person, just inconsistent and generally shallow in his analysis. During his TV appearances--and apparently in person--he masked this shallowness with clever quips. In the end, though, he seemed to be mostly about "getting over" on someone, whether it was Bill Clinton, Mother Teresa, or whomever, but never offering analysis at any depth. This cleverness was nurtured, of course, by the Oxford Union and other places where clever English people develop a taste for it, many never to recover.

I found his support for Bush's invasion of Iraq disgusting beyond belief.

His militant atheism exhibited all the faults of that trend: the self-righteousness, arrogance, and of course outright mimicry of the intolerance of the religionists themselves.

On the CNN blog Stephen Prothero, a respected scholar of comparative religion, makes some telling points about Hitchens' atheist blather. Here are some excerpts.


Prothero: "My love/hate relationship with Christopher Hitchens started when I read “God Is Not Great.” Before that, he was a hero of mine. I loved his slashing style, his intelligence, his learning, his self-possession and, above all, his passion. But I hated this book.

"So I panned it in the “Washington Post.” “I have never encountered a book whose author is so fundamentally unacquainted with its subject,” I wrote, before taking Hitchens to task for demonstrating one of his own pet themes: “the ability of dogma to put reason to sleep.”

"I panned the book because I knew Hitchens could take it, and because he deserved it. But what really motivated me was disappointment. I had disagreed with him before, of course. But in every other case I had the sneaking suspicion he knew more than I did about the subject. And even if he didn’t, I didn’t care, because he was always so much fun to read. . . .

"Everyone has a blind spot, however, and for Hitchens it was religion. I remember being confused when I began reading “God Is Not Great,” chiefly because I agreed with virtually everything he was saying. Of course, religious institutions have visited all manner of horrors on humanity. Of course, theological writing is often literally incredible. And yes the whole enterprise can be poisonous.

"But what I finally saw was that Hitchens wasn’t really dynamiting, as he believed, the whole world of “religion.” He was just blowing up, over and over again, his little corner of a little vacant lot in his own little neighborhood and imagining he was leveling Mecca and Rome.

"The problem with Hitchens’ writing on religion is that he did what many preachers do; he let his emotions get the best of him, and then he started preaching to the choir. In the process, he helped to lead a whole generation of New Atheists down a rabbit hole of their own imagining.

"Inside that fantasy world, the atheists are always the smartest boys in the class, and around every corner there is a new religious sin to sneer and chuckle at. In the real world, there are millions of intelligent Christians and Muslims, Hindus and Jews sneering and chuckling at precisely the same stuff. The criticism of religion begins, believe it or not, with embarrassment in the pews."

The three A's: the other side of the coin

From time to time in these pages I have shared segments of my sweeping, acerbic critique of the three Abrahamic religions. When it is not expository (sometimes dully so), the narrative is relentlessly negative. The various parts are collected in my Abrahamicalia.blogspot.com.

Yet is this the whole story? Belatedly I have sought to set forth, very briefly, what might be termed the case for the defense, that is, some major positive 3-A contributions. What follows is just a sketch, and additions and comments are welcome.


A DIFFERENT VIEW

In Abrahamicalia.blogspot.com, emphasis has fallen on the prescriptive, often repressive aspects of the Abrahamic faiths. These are indeed salient. Still, there is another side of the coin: the creative harvest of these traditions in literature, music, and the visual arts. (There are also significant effects in the sphere of political theory and action, to be discussed at the end.)

The enumeration of the positive contribution requires some qualifications. Laudable as the cultural achievements are, most of them are, to be blunt, in the past tense. Today we cherish them as historical landmarks and not, for the most part, as components of living traditions. The explanations for this decline are complex, but one such reason, surely, is that they depended on a credulous and precritical understanding of the Abrahamic scriptures and the associated institutional structures that enforced them as norms. Then was then, and now is now. Such religion-based cultural endeavors are no longer in synch with the cyberuniverse that has come to dominate the twenty-first century.

In what follows I note, in the briefest possible compass, some salient aspects of this religion-based heritage. First come the cultural contributions, with a brief discussion of political ramifications at the end.

1. Literature. The Hebrew poets of medieval Spain, to take one example, drew upon the imagery and prosody of the Hebrew Bible. Yet prior to modern times, their writings had little impact outside of Jewish circles.

More massive was the impress on literature in Indo-European languages, those in use among Christian peoples. Already in pagan times, Longinus had noted the sublime effect of of one Biblical phrase: "Let there be light." In a different way, Jerome’s translation of the Vulgate introduced a new appreciation of simple, humble discourse, the Sermo Humilis, as Erich Auerbach has shown. Later, this text served as the vehicle for the first great monument of the art of printing, the Gutenberg Bible of 1450-55,

In the evolution of English literature, the King James version of the Bible (1611) ranks as the single most important influence. Three major poems of John Milton (1608-1674)--Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes--revisit Biblical subjects.

Yet the formal properties of the Hebrew Bible were not fully appreciated until the analysis of Bishop Robert Lowth (1710-1787). In 1754 he was awarded a Doctorate in Divinity by Oxford University, for his treatise on Hebrew poetry entitled Praelectiones Academicae de Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum (On the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews). Lowth seems to have been the first modern Bible scholar to have observed the poetic structure of the Psalms and much of the prophetic literature of the Old Testament. In Lecture 19 he sets forth the classic statement of parallelism which still today is the most fundamental category for understanding Hebrew poetry. He identifies three forms of parallelism, the synonymous, antithetic, and synthetic (i.e. balance only in the manner of expression without either synonymy or antithesis).

In modern times, the free verse of Walt Whitman stands out as the most influential exemple of dependence on Hebrew poetry--mediated of course by the King James Version.

2. Music. Quite naturally, the liturgy of the synagogue migrated into the monodic early Christian chant. Later, beginning in the twelfth century, Leoninus and his successor Perotinus, both associated with Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, introduced polyphony, a revolutionary achievement.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), arguably the supreme composer of the Western tradition, preeminently composed Christian choral music (his B-minor mass, passions, and cantatas). Hymns and spirituals continue Biblical and Christian themes on the popular level.

Today, the influence of religion is less evident in classical music. Yet two living composers, the Estonian Arvo Pärt and the Englishman John Tevener, have achieved striking effects by returning to older religious modes.

3. Architecture. The emperor Constantine’s adaptation of the Roman basilica type set the course for all subsequent church architecture in the West, a tradition that achieved its highest flowering in the Gothic cathedrals (ca. 1150-1550).

4. Representational arts. In part based on Jewish exemplars, early Christian iconography became the norm for narrative cycles for at least one thousand years. These effects may be seen today in frescoes on church walls, panel paintings, metalwork, and monumental sculpture. Biblical scenes are central to the work of Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and countless other artists.

5. Film. At one time the genre of Biblical films occupied an important place in Hollywood’s array of production. For example, Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel Ben Hur has been filmed at least three times (1907, 1925, and 1959). Probably the supreme example of a religious blockbuster was The Ten Commandments (1956), Cecil B. DeMille’s tour de force.

Twenty years later the mood had decidedly changed, witness Norman Jewison’s Jesus Christ Superstar (1973). Based on the Andrew Lloyd Weber-Tim Rice musical, this entertainment gave a counterculture twist to the genre. This was followed by Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), which was decidedly irreverent. Finally, in 2004 The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson’s controversial vision of the death of Jesus, seemed to have given new vitality to the genre of religion-themed films, but the effect did not prove lasting.

6. Islam and its arts. During the nineteenth century, Western awareness of Islam was mainly evident in the picturesque canvases of the Orientalist painters. In the following century, however, there was greater appreciation for the nonrepresentational works of the minor arts of Islam as seen in tiles, metalwork, carpets, and other such objects.

A FURTHER POINT

There is one other sphere, too vast to be adequately covered here, in which religion has made important positive contributions. That is the area of social change.

I begin with a somewhat remote example, the career of Pope Gregory VII, who died in 1085. Following in the path of some earlier reformers, Gregory confronted head-on the then-urgent problem of imperial domination of the church, and by extension the whole of Western European society. Boldly, he engaged Emperor Henry IV in a fundamental power struggle, with the aim of making the papacy supreme, not the imperial power. The result, fortunately for society, was a kind of compromise in which the principle of separation of powers emerged. Today, the churches have (or should have) withdrawn from institutional participation in public life, but the principle of separation of powers is enshrined in the very structure of United States government.

Another major issue is that of slavery. To be sure, the Bible has been used to defend the practice of chattel slavery. Yet in the latter part of the eighteenth century a group of prelates in England began to call for an end to the slave trade, on the grounds that all individuals are equally children of God. This tradition was picked up and carried further by the Abolitionists in North America. It reemerged later in the civil rights movement, where a major, probably indispensable role was played by Dr. Martin Luther King and other black clergy.

Buddhism lite

As an undergraduate majoring in art history, I felt a strong attraction to some Buddhist art, especially Chinese sculptures which conveyed an ethereal beauty and calm. Painted mandalas also appealed to me as mind maps.

In those days I read a few Buddhist scriptures in order to get some background for these aesthetic perceptions. I also fell into the Zen fad for a time. Only with my retirement did I begin to think seriously about becoming a Buddhist, and I read more deeply. At the end of the day, though, I found that I was not really ready for the renunciation that a true commitment would call for.

I have always suspected that many Western converts to the faith were only committed to a kind of “Buddhism lite” that did not call for any serious reformation of conduct, merely providing a gloss of confirmation for life patterns already adopted.

Now a new book seems to confirm this intuition. If is :The Bodhisattva's Brain" by Owen Flanagan.

Here is part of the book’s blurb: “If we are material beings living in a material world--and all the scientific evidence suggests that we are--then we must find existential meaning, if there is such a thing, in this physical world. We must cast our lot with the natural rather than the supernatural. Many Westerners with spiritual (but not religious) inclinations are attracted to Buddhism--almost as a kind of moral-mental hygiene. But, as Owen Flanagan points out . . . Buddhism is hardly naturalistic. Atheistic when it comes to a creator god, Buddhism is otherwise opulently polytheistic, with spirits, protector deities, ghosts, and evil spirits. Its beliefs include karma, rebirth, nirvana, and nonphysical states of mind. What is a nonreligious, materially grounded spiritual seeker to do? In The Bodhisattva's Brain, Flanagan argues that it is possible to subtract the "hocus pocus" from Buddhism and discover a rich, empirically responsible philosophy that could point us to one path of human flourishing. "Buddhism naturalized," as Flanagan constructs it, contains a metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics; it is a fully naturalistic and comprehensive philosophy, compatible with the rest of knowledge.”

I like the expression “opulently polytheistic,” which seems apt for Mahayana Buddhism, where such exuberance has long fostered the production splendid works of art. The caves at Dun Huang in Western China are just brimming over with examples. However, the idea of “subtracting the hocus pocus” seems banal and anticlimactic. After all, such lite versions of Judaism and Christianity have long been on offer; most of us find them unappealing. If science and secular philosophy provide the answers, why do we need the supposed confirmation of an emasculated theology to back them up?

Sam Harris, an atheist writer who has dabbled in Buddhism, holds that it can enrich the study of the human mind. However, Flanagan seems skeptical about this claim. Others who admire the book include the Christian religious thinker Alastair MacIntire, who maintains that this approach can throw light on “human flourishing,” and Patricia Churchland, a professor of philosophy who specializes in the study of the brain.

AS I pointed out in Abrahmicalia, one of the problems with the current attack on religion is that it is mainly restricted to the Abrahamic triad. Is Buddhism a viable alternative? Maybe, but not in this ghostly, etiolated form.