Oxford philosopher, Gerard J Hughes SJ, takes a critical look at the views of the ‘arch-enemy of religion’, Richard Dawkins, but also notes how the attitudes and behaviour of some Christians play into his hands.

How do you react to Professor Richard Dawkins’ views on the pernicious nature of all religion and of Christianity in particular? A mixture of outrage, a certain sneaking sympathy, and a desire to hear what might be said by way of serious reply? All three responses are fair enough, I think. In the following brief reflections, I am not going to have much to say about what is outrageous in Dawkins. For detailed, measured and trenchant responses, I would thoroughly recommend the books by Alistair McGrath and Keith Ward. What I want to do here is to suggest what Christians might have to learn from the fact that some of his criticisms do strike a sympathetic chord in many of his readers, and even in many of his Christian readers. In so doing, I hope to show why it is that his many valid points do not in the end succeed in making his overall case.

Dawkins returns time and again to the same basic points. The first is that Christians, in their belief that the bible is an inspired book, are committed either to believing many things which are scientifically indefensible, or to adopting various dishonest evasive manoeuvres to try to deny that the most absurd of these statements are in the bible at all. His second point is that Christians hold a view of faith which places religious faith completely beyond reasonable discussion or scientific counter-argument. In our modern world, such unsupported prejudices deserve no credence, and can be positively damaging. Any beliefs worthy of respect must stand up to scientific criticism. Science is the gold standard for all truth.

I shall argue that we Christians have ourselves unfortunately provided some grounds for each of the two main criticisms: I shall further argue that there is no need for us to do anything of the kind; and I shall conclude with some brief thoughts about Dawkins’ views of science.

What the Bible actually claims to be true

It seems undeniable that most Christians, or at least those in the West, have gradually over the centuries lost touch with the languages and cultures in which the biblical texts, both Jewish and Christian, were written. The result is that Christian tradition generally has tended more and more to take all narrative passages in the biblical books as if they were descriptions of historical events, often entirely missing the crucial theological messages which those passages contained.

How do we typically try to express truths? Our normal style is to try to formulate straightforward predominantly factual statements, shorn of metaphor, lacking in poetic charm, but making the most of clarity and precision. I say that predominantly we express ourselves like that; but even we do other things as well. Contemporary scientists, at least when they are working at the limits of our understanding, themselves have to use metaphors and models – black holes, tiny strings vibrating in ten dimensions, particles with spin and charm, selfish genes. And more broadly, we might wish to insist that there are many truths about ourselves and our world which cannot be properly captured other than in poetry. Still, in our post-Enlightenment culture we do tend to focus primarily on the straight, unvarnished, precise facts. It was not always thus, however. The emphasis on metaphor and models played a larger role in civilisations which were less able to conduct precise measurements, less interested, perhaps, in purely mechanical facts. In understanding what was written in distant civilisations we need constantly to bear in mind what were their interests, and how their linguistic conventions worked in the expression of truth.

In some future era, even our own culture could be open to much misunderstanding. Imagine a future generation which no longer realised that Dad’s Army or Yes, Minister are sitcoms, and took the first as a documentary on the Home Guard, and the second as the video-records of meetings in the conclaves of Whitehall; or did not realise that Animal Farm is an allegorical novel, and read it as a description of some extraordinary episode in evolutionary history. Such mistakes simply could not be made by our contemporaries, because we are all well aware of the conventions and concerns of our culture; we effortlessly pick up the relevant cues in the sitcoms, we promptly see the point of the details in the allegorical narrative. All three make comments on our world, comments which may or may not give a fair picture of how things are: but they do not say what they say in straightforward factual ways. Failure to grasp that is a fundamental misunderstanding. But mistakes of just those kinds have frequently been made by Christians who took the opening chapters of the book of Genesis as a factual description of the stages in which the matter in the universe was organised into the cosmos as we know it. Later Christians were insufficiently attuned to the concerns of the author to see that those chapters are above all a monotheistic manifesto, a theological counterblast to those contemporary polytheist accounts which explained the conflict of good and evil in our world as the result of quarrels between good and bad gods. The writer of these chapters of Genesis is making an important statement, indeed; the claim is that there is but one God, that he made everything, and that everything he made was good. If there is suffering and death in our world, that explanation has to be sought elsewhere, in human failures but not in polytheism. Those, rather than truths about astrophysics, are the truths upon which the texts are focussed.

Similarly, the narratives of the conception, birth and infancy of Jesus in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke are theological prefaces to the description of Jesus’ ministry, with which all four Gospels begin their more straightforward account of what Jesus said and did. The aim of the infancy narratives is to give an imaginative presentation of some profound theological truths – that Jesus is more than a prophet, that he is messiah, sent directly from God; that his ministry is that of a second Moses; that he fulfils the expectations of Jewish tradition despite his sufferings and his apparent powerlessness. The Fourth Gospel in its opening chapter makes just the same points, only this time they are couched in abstract rather than imaginative language. In all four gospels the aim is that the reader should come to the account of the ministry of Jesus with the theological stage well and truly set. It is a mistake to read them as giving a chronological history of the events in Jesus’ early years, just as it is to read Animal Farm as recounting what really happened in some part of rural Sussex or wherever, or Yes, Minister as the tape of actual Whitehall conversations. Yet the novel is offering insights into the historical appeal of Marxist totalitarianism and the corruption to which it leads, and the sitcom is laughing at the delusions which politicians actually have about their own power. Just so, the infancy narratives are concerned with the true significance of Jesus’ life, but what they have to say does not depend on their being a factual record of Jesus’ early years; they prepare the reader to grasp the true significance of the two or three years during which Jesus lived, preached and died.

Dawkins, frequently treats these and other parts of the Bible in a way in which he would never dream of treating Dad’s Army, Yes, Minister or Animal Farm. But he has been given considerable encouragement to do so by the way in which Christians themselves have misread the bible and in so doing have failed to see which are the truths which the biblical texts convey. Thus, some Christians have responded to his misdirected criticisms by trying to defend creationism, or the moving star of Bethlehem, as though the bible is trying to make truth claims about cosmogony or astronomy, rather than about monotheism and Christology. The bible, so far as I know, says nothing which is either directly compatible or in any way incompatible with evolution, for the simple reason that nothing the Bible claims to be true relates to that topic at all. Space does not here permit me to make similar points about many other biblical passages, where theological argument is all too frequently mistaken for scientific or historical description.

I am not in any sense, as Dawkins often hints, advocating some kind of devious evasiveness, ’sophisticated’ Christianity in some pejorative sense, any more than I am being devious in my reading of Animal Farm. There is plenty of evidence – as Dawkins rightly insists we look for, and would, I hope, himself be ready to consider – to show that these ancient texts would have been immediately understood by their authors and original audiences in the ways I have suggested. That evidence is to be found by understanding the cultures in which those texts arose – what they were concerned with, what they took to be controversial and important to get right, and what literary devices they had at their disposal to get their points across. To varying degrees, all the Christian churches have, sadly, been nervous and slow to see the importance and true value of such evidence, and have for too long behaved as if a simple list of events were the most or the only important things which the biblical books had to give us. It is to a considerable extent our own fault that Christianity has been so misunderstood. In a strange way, many Christians and Dawkins start from the same mistaken views about what the biblical writers actually claim to be true. Both sides need radical re-education before any debate between Dawkins and Christians can be at all useful to anyone interested in the truth.

The perils of blind faith

The other constant theme in Dawkins’ criticism of religions, or at any rate of Christianity, is what he takes to be the way in which faith is promoted as a virtue; for, he argues, to do that is to imply that it is positively admirable to hold beliefs for which there is no good evidence. Once again, it seems to me that in Christian history there has been at least some basis for this criticism. This can be seen in the ways in which Christian authorities have responded when anything comes up which even appears to provide good grounds for questioning what is authoritatively taught. The basis of the authority can vary considerably: it might be what is taken to be the clear teaching of the bible; or some position to which a Christian church has been committed for a long time and perhaps has never questioned at all; it might be what is insisted upon by legitimate church authority at some particular time of crisis or dispute. If reasons for questioning such a position are advanced, they may be moral, or philosophical, or scientific – consider disputes about contraception, or homosexuality; or disputes about the ordination of women based upon a philosophical doctrine of non-discrimination; or about whether it is essential to Christianity to hold that we are all descended from just one pair of humans, or whether it makes sense to speak of an immortal soul. One possible religious response to any of these issues is to appeal to the status of the authority in question – the bible, or the bishops, or the pope, or the general assembly, claiming that such an authority cannot be vulnerable to attacks based on purely secular considerations. The bible is divinely inspired, the Church is guided by the Holy Spirit, what is taught is therefore to be believed without question by the faithful.

Very few Christians, and certainly very few Catholics, have seriously maintained that anyone has to believe, in faith, something which is contrary to what can be rationally established. Even the classical American Fundamentalists in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in their various ways held that science could indeed support what they believed to be the truths taught by the bible. They thought there was, or could be found, archaeological evidence for the age of the earth which would match calculations made from biblical data on the ages of the patriarchs, or would demonstrate the universality of the Flood, or the existence of leviathans capable of giving hospitality to Jonah. Whatever one might think about the reasonableness of such expectations, they were part of an overall view that faith and human reason could not in the end conflict.

That overall view is clear in theory: reason and faith cannot ultimately conflict, since truth is one. But there are two important points which need to be made. The first is to do with ‘mysteries’. Dawkins in one place suggests that religion does not want to solve mysteries. In one sense I think this is true. The nature of God is, I would suggest, irreducibly mysterious beyond our comprehension. To recognise this is no more than to acknowledge the limits of the human mind. What we can truly say about God is limited: and even what we believe about God in the light of revelation is limited by the fact that revelation itself is unavoidably restricted to what we can to some extent understand. Since we cannot comprehend the nature of God, neither can we fully comprehend what it means to say of a man that he is God. But we can realise that to say that Jesus is both God and man is not at all the same kind of assertion as, for instance,that a centaur is both horse and man. In the centaur case, we are dealing with two created, and therefore limited, kinds of thing, and we are trying to add them together as best we may. We have all seen statues of centaurs. But the divine nature and human nature are not two kinds of thing at all. God is transcendent; that is to say, God is not a kind of thing, nor a member of a kind, which can in any sense be ‘added’ to something else which is a member of another, human, kind. The unity of God and man in Jesus is in the strictest sense a mystery; trying to ’solve it’ by any kind of cut and paste technique is almost certainly going to lead either to a damaging kind of ‘dumbing down’, or else to a denial that Jesus is fully human, ‘like us in everything apart from sin.’ The Arian and the Docetist heresies are examples of the dangers of trying to understand: the first ‘dumbs down’ by denying that there is anything more to be said of the earthly Jesus of Nazareth than can be said of any human being: the second tries to say so much more (about what Jesus knew, or his relationship to the Father, or his inability to sin, to take some examples) that in the end Jesus ends up simply as God appearing in some ways to be human. In the end we have to believe, but not understand, that Jesus is fully God and fully human; and we must explain why there are good reasons for not expecting to be able to say more. Saying too much about mysteries is almost always ill advised.

But Dawkins’ main complaint is that believers prefer unsolved ‘mysteries’ even when dealing with perfectly ordinary this-world realities. If someone dies a mysterious death, the true believer, he suggests, must prefer to say that God struck them down than to try to learn more about the medical condition from which the person died. Dawkins strongly disapproves of appealing to faith when there appear to be perfectly good rational ways of trying to reach conclusions about something. This seems to me to be a perfectly proper approach to take. Certainly in the Catholic tradition, in which the importance of reason in both theology and in ethics is emphasised, there is no disagreement in principle with what Dawkins says on this point. But of course that does not settle everything, for two reasons:

First, it is not always clear whether the issue is one which involves faith or one which can and should be settled on rational grounds; the legitimacy of the ordination of women would be one such example. The Pontifical Biblical commission concluded that there were no strictly biblical arguments against the ordination of women; and it is not entirely clear from the way the topic is currently discussed in Catholic or in Anglican circles whether the main dispute is a rational one about the status of women and the suitability of women acting in a role which is intended to symbolise what a man, Jesus of Nazareth, once did. It has also been argued that the issue is to be settled on strictly theological grounds.

Secondly, in ethics, the general view that ethical requirements derive from the nature of human beings does indeed leave room for dispute on what conclusions can be drawn from that statement; but it does not sit at all easily with the claim that there can be good theological reasons for going against what might be thought to be the balance of reasonable opinion. Nor does it remotely suggest that Christians should regard as especially important those ethical issues which are immediately connected to sexual conduct. Dawkins all too often has a point. An eminent Christian moral philosopher once remarked to me how distressed he was to see how often the Christian churches produce arguments in ethics which he would not have accepted from a second year philosophy undergraduate. Ethics is, and should be, a complex subject, because human beings are complex creatures, and the ways in which they are capable of interacting with one another and with their environments are likewise complex and very varied. How any of these considerations in the end affects human fulfilment is not always at all easy to determine – as current discussions about the environment, or genetic engineering, or the global economy, or developmental psychology amply demonstrate. There is nothing in Christianity which suggests that these issues ought to be at once simple and clear, much as we might wish that they were; and nothing that would justify the claim to settle them by appeal to revelation when the empirical facts would support more than one reasonable conclusion.

Science in its place

Where I think Dawkins is at his weakest is in what I would term his ’scientism’. This is disguised by the fact that he at every turn insists upon the importance of evidence, as indeed he should (though it must be said that he does not in this respect always practise what he preaches). The claim that every question about ourselves and our world can in principle be settled by methods which can ultimately be reduced to those of physics is a highly disputable claim, disputable for reasons which have nothing to do with religion. The debates in neuroscience, for instance, reveal a near-deadlock, with some neuroscientists and some philosophers on each side, about whether the phenomenon of consciousness, or the content of concepts and beliefs, can be explained simply in terms of neuro-electronics; indeed there is not even agreement on what will count as an explanation. Again, suppose the universe of space-time to have had a beginning, it is plain enough that its appearance is not going to be explicable simply by appeal to the laws of physics, whose truth is contingent upon the existence of the universe which they describe. If the coming-to-be of the universe is to be explained, then both the sense of ‘explain’ and the type of explanation are not going to be scientific. Nor can God be described, as Dawkins often does, as ‘improbable’; for he intends that term to be understood at least vaguely in the same sense in which it might appear in a scientific argument. But he gives absolutely no account of what the basis for the calculation of probability might be based upon in the case of God; nor indeed whether it makes any sense at all to require that God’s existence be probable in a scientific sense. Whether there are good reasons for holding that God exists is indeed a controversial question; but it is not, nor is it reducible to, a scientific question. And even Dawkins, in his rather confused studies of moral issues, while rightly insisting that there might be scientific evidence which is relevant to those issues (for instance, the rate and causes of global warming), has nothing coherent to say to support his extraordinary claim that ethical argument is no more than a sub-section of scientific argument.

I cannot comment on how good a biologist Dawkins is: but it seems to me that there are good reasons for saying that his claim that all arguments must in the end be settled by appeal to physical evidence is itself quite unproven – and that it does not even remotely sound like the kind of claim that could be proved on Dawkins’ own terms.

Summing it all up

To conclude, then. Dawkins does indeed provide a useful wake-up call to make the accepted conclusions of most biblical scholars and most theologians much more widely known and accepted in the Christian churches. Believers have on the whole a bad record in the way we respond to the advancement of science and the growing complexity of morality in our technologically and environmentally ever more complex world. We have tended to sound, and often to be, reluctant to accept undisputed scientific findings so that we can try to work out how they can be integrated into our overall picture of our world as God’s creation. The lessons of Galileo, biblical criticism, evolutionary biology, contemporary physics, psychology and medicine forever seem to catch believers unprepared, nervous, and defensive. At his best, Dawkins calls attention to that fact. At his worst, the exaggerations which he has to make serve only to indicate why such nervous reluctance on the part of believers is ultimately unnecessary.Gerry J Hughes SJ was head of the philosophy department at Heythrop College, University of London, and is currently tutor in philosophy at Campion Hall, Oxford. He is the author of “Aristotle on Ethics” and “Is God to Blame?”

   This article was originally published in Thinking Faith, the online journal of the British Jesuits

Here’s that promised piece on Kolbe. I must confess to finding it incredibly
frustrating to articulate and translate my thoughts into words on a screen.
But, for better or for worse, here it is (and apologies for the unseemly
length).

Maximilian Kolbe, 1894-1941 (and Charles)

A dear college friend once told me about Maximilian Kolbe in the midst of a
seemingly interminable late night discussion that flitted between morality,
religion and cooking Thai curries. In retrospect, my points in this particular
discussion – one of many I fondly recall – were not particularly compelling.  I
remember resorting to ‘that’s just your opinion’ rather too often, and my one
good point – about how wonderful galangel is when making Thai (or, rather,
vaguely South East Asian) food – was rather a meagre one. Anyhow, I remember
being quite taken by the story she narrated about Kolbe, and that was despite,
I confess, almost not wanting to be taken by it.

I won’t mention much about his life as a whole, though it is hardly
uninteresting. The aspect which continues to fascinate me is his death. I
cannot write much about the various sources with which this has been pieced
together, though I understand that it is based on the testimonies of various
inmates and camp wardens.  This does not trouble me at all: so much of what we
know about the concentration camps is based on such testimonies (as opposed to
administrative sources) and our knowledge is all the richer for it. The
writings of a Viktor Frankl or Primo Levi are far more compelling – and I mean
that including in the sense of writing history – than, say, a secretary’s log
(even if such a log is vital source material too). It does mean that there are
some things I will not be able to answer if quizzed: for instance, the account
below of Kolbe’s brief dialogue with an Auschwitz commandant doubtless glosses
over the fact of interpretation (I mean in the sense of language barriers).

In February 1941, Kolbe was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Warsaw.
(He had been involved in various print and radio undertakings before the Nazis’
arrival and, I understand, his arrest was related to this). In May, he was
transferred to Auschwitz. Though he would be dead a few months later, there are
some testimonies about his time there (for instance, by a doctor who treated
him: Kolbe had earlier in the year suffered an inflammation of the lungs).

Now, there was some sort of rule at Auschwitz that if a man escaped, ten men
would be killed as punishment. And, the story goes, in July, a man from Kolbe’s
block escaped. The men from the block were led out in front of the commandant,
Karl Fritsch.  It was understood that the punishment would be the starvation
bunker: at the height of summer, this meant an agonising death, usually in
days, without food or water. Ten men were selected. One of these, Franciszek
Gajowniczek, had been imprisoned for helping the Polish Resistance. He
instinctively exclaimed: ‘My poor wife! My poor children! What will they do?’.

At this point, Kolbe stepped forward, took off his cap and offered himself: “I
am a Catholic priest,” he explained to the commandant, “Let me take his place.
I am old. He has a wife and children.”

Interestingly, the commandant came to agree to this. Gajowniczek stepped back
into file and Kolbe joined the wretched nine in their grim fate. In the bunker,
things soon became terrible. Some men would drink their own urine. According to
a janitor (if my memory serves me correctly), however, there were no screams or
even the sounds of the desperate one might have expected. Kolbe is said to have
led these men in hushed prayers and hymns. A fortnight in, four men remained,
including Kolbe. Needing the cell (for more conspicuous punishment?), the camp
executioner came in to inject each man’s arm with a dose of lethal carbolic
acid. At his turn, Kolbe, kneeling down, is said to have raised up and offered
his arm to the executioner. He died on 14th August 1941. For what it is worth,
I should add that Kolbe was beatified in 1970 and canonised in 1982.
Gajowniczek, I believe, was present at both ceremonies. And, apparently, there
is also one more detail: the man whose alleged escape precipitated the whole
episode was, apparently, found dead in a latrine not long after. It appears
that he had fallen in by mistake.

Now, let me be clear. I do not think that Kolbe’s being Catholic – or even being
a priest – is separable from his story, from his very identity. But, I don’t at
all wish to recall this in a triumphalistic way. (My sister’s ex-boyfriend is a
quarter Polish. His maternal grandmother was an inmate at Auschwitz for several
years and he said that the greatest perversities – he did not specify – in
Auschwitz were perpetrated by Catholic priests).

Rather, I find it interesting – particular the exchange, the literal redemption
of Gajowniczek – for several reasons, albeit ones which are not easy to
articulate. First off, I am struck by, for want of a better phrase, the sheer
goodness of such a deed.  This begs all sorts of questions. What were his
duties? Was this a ‘supererogatory’ act? What were his motives? Do the
consequences matter? For instance, to a strict consequentialist – I mean the
devious kind who is not averse to torturing philosophy students with devilish
scenarios featuring fat pot-holers and narrow cave entrances – upon hearing of
the bare bones of the exchange, it might or might not be good.

Perhaps there is something awry when we can even speak in the language of
consequentialism versus deontology versus virtue ethics etc in immediately
responding to this kind of deed. I’m certainly glad that my immediate reaction
was one which I can only imperfectly articulate as that sense of sheer
goodness. (It’s worth pointing out that this would still be my reaction, I
imagine, even if the commandant had decided to make Kolbe an eleventh damned
man). It is the kind of sheer goodness that animates and relieves so many of
the stories in the Holocaust. There is another one in Primo Levi’s If This Is
Man, and I think it’s worth quoting. The incident takes place during the last
weeks at Auschwitz, when Russian artillery was audible and liberation felt
tantalisingly close:

“That night held ugly surprises.
Ladmaker, in the bunk under mine, was a poor wreck of a man. He was (or had
been) a Dutch Jew, seventeen years old, tall, thin and gentle. He had been in
bed for three months; I have no idea how he had managed to survive the
selections. He had had typhus and scarlet fever successively; at the same time
a serious cardiac illness had shown itself, while he was smothered with
bedsores, so much so that by now he could only lie on his stomach. Despite all
this, he had a ferocious appetite. He only spoke Dutch, and none of us could
understand him…In the middle of the night, he groaned and then threw himself
from his bed. He tried to reach the latrine, but was too weak and fell to the
ground crying and shouting loudly.
Charles lit the lamp…and we were able to ascertain the gravity of the situation.
The boy’s bed and the floor were filthy. The smell in the small area was rapidly
becoming insupportable…And the poor wretch, suffering from typhus, formed a
terrible source of infection, while he could certainly not be left all night to
groan and shiver in the cold in the middle of the filth.
Charles climbed down from his bed and dressed in silence. While I held the lamp,
he cut all the dirty patches from the straw mattress and the blankets with a
knife. He lifted Ladmaker from the ground with the tenderness of a mother,
cleaned him as best as possible with straw taken from the mattress and lifted
him into the remade bed in the only position in which the unfortunate fellow
could lie, He scraped the floor with a scrap of tin plate, diluted a little
chloramines and finally spread disinfectant over everything, including
himself.”

I imagine that upon reading this sort of thing, we marvel at something. One
interesting, additional point, in both cases, lies with what might, from a
particular perspective, be the futility of these acts (though I do not think
that this is quite what we marvel at). Ladmaker will most probably die. Kolbe
might just end up getting both himself and Gajowniczek killed. Even at his
execution – the symbolic gesture of offering one’s arm, of accepting death, of
dying well – is futile, in a sense. And yet these are also symbolically
powerful acts. And something of their power, inevitably, lies in imagining
oneself in such a position. I must confess that, as much as I would like to
think otherwise, I could not vouch that I would act in such a way.

Second, even if our responses to these stories are emotional – and why should
they not be? – I am not so easily convinced that they can be easily interpreted
(and, rather summarily, dismissed) as ‘just’ emotive responses, as if the truly
objective/scientific/rational (delete as appropriate) response would be: Kolbe,
male, bearded, approximately 6”1, member of block x; at 1403hrs, Kolbe speaks
etc. The responses turn upon understanding what is enacted (and, to add another
layer, we might be responding both to Charles’ tenderness and Levi’s recognition
of this tenderness). The actions of a Kolbe or a Charles are intelligible to us.
This does not mean we can possibly know the precise intentions, though we might
imagine them and this imagining has certain limits. At the very least, is there
something about the enactments in such stories, about their very much
intelligible actions, which elicits such a response?

Third, these have to be stories. They are narratives. And I am quite taken by
the idea that, in all sorts of ways, narratives are central to our
understanding of all manner of things. To reiterate, even something like the
Kolbe story or anecdotes in Levi is both completely singular and yet wholly
informative for the light it sheds on the possibilities for human (inter)action
in somewhere like Auschwitz. And it offers the kind of illumination of being at
somewhere like Auschwitz that an entire textbook on the excavation of Auschwitz
could not.

These are scattered – and hopefully – not too trite thoughts. I think that I am
probably right in thinking that most people are moved by such stories and
respond to them with something akin to what I called a sense of sheer goodness
(whatever terms others might use). Let’s say as a general rule that most
people, roughly speaking, do respond in such a way.

Here are two possible questions to consider: what of those who do not respond in
such a way? Suppose someone were to say, ‘Well, Kolbe didn’t save any of the
other nine’, or ‘Charles was being stupid, he should have left that guy to
reduce his own chances of contracting typhus’: are our reactions ‘just emotive’
to the point that I cannot reasonably question the propriety – moral,
intellectual – of such a response?

There were many Jewish boys at my school, and I remember that we always had a
memorial for the Shoah each year. (Jewish assembly – religious assembly was on
Thursday, with various options, from Sikh to Catholic, and a non-religious one
too – was possibly the most popular: you would see boys with turbans listening
to a Rabbi sing on his guitar about kosher food). One time, I remember that we
finished and filed out. There had been readings animated by silent documentary
footage from various concentration camps, including those seemingly familiar
photographs of emaciated inmates. I still remember a boy (Jewish, as it
happens) make a joke, as we treaded out, about their being anorexics and all he
got were silent glares. My long-winded point is this: there is – or, I want
there to be – something more meet, more adequate about the solemn response
almost all of us quite naturally enacted rather than that of the boy who
quipped. It seems to me that our responses were more ‘adequate’ to what we had
seen and heard depicted, they grappled more with what was understood. Or, at
least, our reactions differed not just in terms of emotion, but in our
understandings of the gravity of what we had witnessed.

And, second, if I am right that most people do marvel at such stories, their
marvelling is undoubtedly real: that is, they really do marvel. But are they
just projecting a wholly subjective sense of the marvellous, of ‘sheer
goodness’, onto a Charles or a Kolbe? Or is it truly worthy of marvelling to
offer one’s life for or cradle a fellow inmate with “the tenderness of a
mother”?

Gautama travelled on foot throughout north east India seeking knowledge and understanding. He asked questions of the holy men he met and even tried extreme asceticism, which nearly killed him. Nothing produced satisfactory answers to his questions. When he was about 35 years old he resolved not to stir from the spot where he was sitting until he had experienced enlightenment. Through long meditation he eventually came to his great awakening and saw that which he had been seeking. It was at this point that he became the Buddha, which means the enlightened one.

For the remainder of his 80 years he was a mendicant teacher, walking from village to village with his food bowl. When it was full (he ate only once each day) he would retire to a secluded spot to eat and then interested locals would gather round him while he dispensed his wisdom.

His teachings were highly practical and central to them was the concept of dharma, which alternately means the path, the law and nature. Gautama insisted nobody should accept his teachings purely on faith, and instead people should see for themselves by following the dharma, the first step of which is to focus awareness on the breath. To this day, the overwhelming majority of Buddhist traditions place massive importance on the regular practice of meditation. Even if one agrees with Gautama’s teachings on the intellectual level, one is not following the dharma if one does not meditate.

It is not necessary, incidentally, to accept the historical veracity of Gautama’s life, nor even that he existed at all, to be a Buddhist.

These are the core tenets of his teaching.

Four noble truths:

Dukkha. All is suffering.

Samudaya. Suffering is caused by thirst, craving or desire.

Nirodha. The way to alleviate suffering is by controlling and then eliminating one’s craving.

Magga. This can be done by following the eightfold path.

Someone who has fully understood the four noble truths has become fully awakened, or enlightened. This happens during meditation through the attainment of Nirvana, the highest state of spiritual awareness, an experience that is likened to complete emptiness and unity with everything. To reach this state entails a complete dissolution of the ego, a recognition that we do not exist – at least not in the sense that we think we do.

The eightfold path:

Right understanding

Right intention or orientation

These constitute wisdom (panna in Pali)

Right speech

Right action

Right livelihood

These govern ethical conduct (sila)

Right effort

Right mindfulness

Right concentration

These form the necessary mental discipline (samadhi).

There is no Buddhist doctrine; these (and other concepts, teachings and techniques) are for help and guidance. There is no supernatural being that we might equate with God in Buddhism. It is a very human system of striving for self-improvement through compassion.

Born as it was in India, Buddhism derived from Hinduism, another dharmic religion, and the Vedic tradition. It shares with these not just a belief in karma and reincarnation but also the idea of the oneness of everything. Gautama was rebelling against what he saw as the obscuring of the true nature of dharma through dogmas, rituals all the usual accoutrements of religion that detract from the core message. He also saw enlightenment as something that was possible for everyone, not just India’s Brahmin caste.

As is commonplace with religion, some of the rites and rituals that Gautama was trying to break away from have solidified within what is now a multitude of different Buddhist schools. There are several ways in which it is possible to classify these traditions. Perhaps the most common division is into Theravada and Mahayana. However, Tibetan Buddhism is frequently thought of as a third category, also called Vajrayana.

Theravada Buddhism is that practised in Sri Lanka and South East Asia (except Vietnam). It is based on the scriptures, called the Tipitaka or the Pali (the language of the Buddha) canon because it was first written down on palm leaves in this language during the first century BC. These scriptures are a mix of the sayings of Buddha, stories from his previous, guidance on how to live one’s life in accordance with the Buddha’s teachings, and various philosophical observations. Theravada means, ‘The way of the Elders’ and is considered the most conservative of the branches.

Mahayana Buddhism is thought to have originated in south India and spread along the ancient Silk Road into China, Korea and Japan. As well as the Tipataka and the Pali canon, the more fantastical Mahayana sutras are also an important component of its scriptures. Central to Mahayana is the Bodhisattva ideal. Theravada Buddhists hold the specific objective of breaking the cycle of suffering by becoming fully enlightened, after which they will cease to be reincarnated. By contrast the Bodhisattva, who represents the embodiment of compassion and is the being that all Buddhists should strive to be, defers the final stage of enlightenment and instead continues to be reincarnated until suffering can be ended for all humanity. The form of Mahayana Buddhism best known in the west is Zen.

Tibetan is the most esoteric of all forms of Buddhism. Whereas Theravada Buddhism considers Mahayana inauthentic, Tibetan Buddhism accepts it and considers Vajrayana to be a higher expression of it. Its main distinguishing characteristic, apart from having its own scriptures, is that makes use of various Tantric meditation techniques also common to forms of Hinduism. Tibetan Buddhism also places the greatest emphasis on the relationship with the guru, to whom the student is meant to show great devotion.

Some people think that because Buddhism does not invoke a supernatural being that can be equated with God, this makes it atheistic. This is to project western hang-ups about religion onto a belief system that first grew in places without the Aristotelian conception of metaphysics, and Asian Buddhists frequently also believe in deities or forms of animism. Such projections, however, have helped Buddhism to appeal to individuals in the West with deep-rooted aversion to religion, who find themselves in need of some form of spirituality in their lives. Ironically, aversion is a corollary of desire, and as the second noble truth teaches us that desire is the cause of suffering, an inability to get over hang-ups about religion may be indicative of lack of progress along the eight-fold path.

dOm and Boltonian

His thought is so extraordinary because of its attempt to deal with what he terms ‘a world come of age’ in which religion in general and Christianity in particular has been forced out into the margins through developments in secular thought from psychotherapy to physics, sociology to jurisprudence.  Much of his thought remains undeveloped (he was in prison after all) but it still retains a brilliance and a relevance for our times possibly because of the context of his writing.  One wonders what he would make of the CiF debates on science, religion and the meaning of life.

A phrase that is often deployed in his letters on the world come of age is a Latin quotation from the Dutch jurist Grotius, ‘etsi deus non daretur‘ which can be translated as, ‘even if there were no God.’  Allow me to quote at length from a letter to Eberhard Bethge dated July 16th 1944.

“God as a working hypothesis in morals, politics or science has been surmounted and abolished; and the same thing has happened in philosophy and religion (Feuerbach!).  For the sake of intellectual honesty, that working hypothesis should be dropped, or as far as possible, eliminated.  A scientist or physician who sets out to edify is a hybrid.”

“…we cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur.  And this is just what we do recognize – before God!  God himself compels us to recognize it.  So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God.  God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him.  The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34) ['My God! My God!  Why have you forsaken me?'] The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand constantly.  Before God and with God we live without God.  God lets himself be pushed out of  the world onto the cross.  He is weak and powerless in the world and that is the only way in which he is with us and helps us.  Matthew 8:17  makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence but by virtue of his weakness and suffering.”

The extent to which it is possible to construct a religionless approach to Christianity will inevitably be debated by believers and non-believers alike but Bonhoeffer’s story and his striving for intellectual honesty have a resonance that will survive for many years to come.

Your thoughts and observations are , of course, most welcome.

P.S. You can read longer extracts from this letter of Bonhoeffer’s by following this link: July 16th 1944

Herbert McCabe, in his wonderful short book, The Good Life, presents an account of this philosophy. Here is part of his systematics in a nutshell.

The good life is one in which what someone does and feels leads to and is constitutive of their fulfilment. Such wellbeing is neither primarily an experience; nor is it found as a consequence of following moral laws. Rather, happiness is fundamentally an activity:
it is ‘the state of the person who is living without hindrance the life that becomes a human being’, as McCabe puts it.

For human beings, the question of meaning is at the heart of this.
Consider what Aristotle said about living meaningfully. He called it practical intelligence (theoretical intelligence is not to live meaningfully but is to talk about what it would be to do so – as this piece does). When ethics is reduced to a purely theoretical matter, as when say it is thought to be only about determining rules, principles or beliefs, it therefore fails. Practical intelligence not only judges well what is a good thing to do but also, crucially, springs from who you are and what is most becoming of your humanity.
It involves not only reason and intellect but character, imagination, stories and wisdom; in short, the whole of life’s experience.

This opens up another aspect of the good life, namely that of its having a narrative or story – the account of life within which intentions have meaning. Being able to give such an account of your life – to have an autobiography – is also, therefore, part of human meaningfulness. This is where religion comes in. McCabe argues that the life of grace, or divine life, is to participate in the narrative of God.

To put it another way, ethics is not primarily about what is good but is about what counts as good for human beings. So to be virtuous is not just to act ethically for the sake of something else that is good (as in consequentialist ethics) or to avoid something else that is bad (as in deontological ethics). It is a whole orientation of character and, again as McCabe would suggest, can be said to be religious since it is also a whole orientation of life, aimed at what is regarded as ultimately good – namely the divine.

This returns us again to the question of meaning. To have meaning is to enter into a language and, because language is social, thereby also a community. ‘Language is the nervous system of the human community. It is the context for meaning.’ Also, whilst my thoughts are my thoughts, meaning is found in the way in which they transcend my individuality by connecting me with something bigger than myself – which at least inasmuch as that is immaterial can be called that which is spiritual. Again, the believer sees God here.

Incidentally, this view is also the opposite of the Cartesian way of thinking, in which the spiritual is private: for Descartes individuals reach their spiritual selves by withdrawing from the community into themselves, not by engaging with it.

What then is human freedom? It is the choices and decisions enacted in the story of a life. But this stems from human meaning, which is to say, via language, from being part of the linguistic community: it is only by being able to interpret the world and give it meaning that it is possible for someone to act freely. So, freedom is not simply to be able to act randomly. The person who is the most free is the person who has the practical intelligence to act ethically; the free will is one that wants to act well. Again, for the believer, this finds its greatest expression in the will of God.

Mark Vernon is the author of two new books, ‘After Atheism’ and ‘What Not To Say’ – www.markvernon.com

www.markvernon.com