Anna Sutcliffe gave this talk to the Yorkshire SoF Group.
In presenting a piece about David Hume and the Edinburgh Enlightenment, Andrew Marr concluded: ‘This is all we have. If we cannot make it work, nothing will.’ Do we agree? I think, on balance, I do, and that is taking note of the mistakes made in the context of the Enlightenment. One problem seems to have been what is called scientism, i.e. taking a hypothesis for proven because of a great desire to believe that something is true – an ironic outcome over against the reluctance to accept the tenets of religion on grounds of lack of hard evidence. Such mistakes seem to have been made in, for instance, medical ‘science’ and psychology, and some are, were, the very language games that characterise the alleged ‘darkness’ of the Middle Ages. If the word hysteron means “womb”, the condition hysteria must – mustn’t it? – be especially characteristic of women?
Any stick is good enough to beat a dog, and women, for most practical purposes, have always been ‘dogs’, and mostly still are. We’ve all met people who give themselves out to be rationalists, and blithely assume that this makes them rational, without further demonstration.
Another flaw, as I see it, of the Enlightenment project, was the disparaging of poetic and mystical experience as such and not just the deploring of claims that such experiences and insights prove something, though of themselves they fail to prove anything. I do not think I hold with the notion of different magisteria – science and poetry according to Mary Midgley, science and religion per Stephen Jay Gould. I incline to agree with Richard Dawkins that, given a bit of hard evidence for the existence of God, we’d hear much less about separate magisteria. All the same, I belong to those who value what I’ll call ‘the poetic dimension’ for its own sake. And religions do impinge upon what I’m calling ‘the poetic’. I hope I do not misunderstand, but Dawkins and others do not seem to allow for the kind of thing to which I refer. I am using the word broadly, not restricting it to the making of verse, though it does show itself most splendidly in that genre, arguably.
All religions, I think, operate to a large extent in the poetic mode. This is why, for instance, I find the image of the Suffering Servant to be one I cannot manage without, even if I go with Richard Dawkins and call myself an atheist (if I do). I take Christianity to be a remarkable amalgam of poetic vision, and a collection of ethical teachings. A good letter appeared in Sofia recently, about the two concepts Jesus and the Christ, for which I was grateful. ‘The Christ’ is to be seen in the very greatest Eastern icons: the heads of Christ, the Virgin (theotokos, the god bearer), etc. The image may be found in poetry, say in English, at least as far as the Reformation. Helen Bellamy and I are working on a presentation involving poetry and music, for which I am suggesting we include John Skelton’s poem ‘Wofully Arrayd’:
Wofully arrayed, My blood, man, For thee, ran, It cannot be nayd, My body, blo and wan, Wofully arrayd which was set to music by William Cornysh, who also worked for Henry VIII.
No, I do not believe that the Jewish man, Jesus, was/is the second person of the Trinity. But I cannot abandon the suffering servant icon. If one argues that religion is wholly bad (as Dawkins seems to do), and one can hardly ignore the unspeakable evils that it has been used to excuse, must one abandon this poetic thing? Most especially, must one abandon it in education? I think even Richard Dawkins might say ‘no’ – so keen is he on the Bible being mediated in education because of its cultural centrality. I would hate to be seen to argue that – if we are to align ourselves with the Enlightenment project (as I think, agreeing with Andrew Marr, we must) that such poetic tropes as I mention might be cast away as so much superstition – or, even, so much mythology.
The task of thus interpreting the matter is one for – shall I say ‘enlightened’ – education, a project far from anything we have today in state education.
Dawkins thinks that the annexing of children as religious affiliates is tantamount to child abuse, but I scarcely think he would disagree with me profoundly about the importance of mediating, for children as well, this, among other ‘poetics’ as I shall say.
A flaw of the Enlightenment project, was the disparaging of poetic and mystical experience as such. Edgar Wind, once Oxford Professor of Fine Art and an early Reith lecturer, said, in his book Art and Anarchy, that we, today (that is, in his day) could never apprehend, say, pagan art representing deities as their makers once did, because we lack their 'sacred fear'. If I translate that to my own case: is my be-glamouring – for want of a better word – by the great icons and poems afforded by Christianity, dependent to some degree – maybe to a large degree – upon my upbringing as a Christian (albeit one brought up in a rather imageless brand of Christianity) who was taught to fear these personages? I shall never know. I do know that I am not at all devoid of a certain kind of rapture when faced by images and stories from pagan cultures. I would, therefore, deplore any education or modification of culture that made impossible the sort of apprehension I have tried to describe.
Nevertheless, I would not want any children of mine constrained to believe except according to the best contemporary evidence – in all humility.
All extant religions are constructs of patriarchal societies, and that, for me, rules them out as ethical guides in large part. When Joanna Dales and I belonged to a group called Leeds Christian Feminists, I recall a young student appearing one night, who said – if she had to choose between Christianity and feminism, she would have to choose feminism.
Religious institutions are always – however they may begin as revolutionary – conservative forces. Don Cupitt tells us that such projects as Médecin sans Frontières are the new body of Christ. Feminism, the cause in large part of the emancipation and empowerment of women, did not come from the churches. The Church of England, in particular (because I know it a bit) hasn’t begun to catch up with the 20th century women’s movement. Philip Knight, talking in Leicester about a neo-catholic theologian, Vattimo, explained his – Vattimo’s – project as the idea that secularism, in our time, is not the enemy of religion, but the inevitable reductio of Christianity, a notion not unlike what we hear from Don Cupitt.
Humanists take great exception to the idea that goodness cannot eventuate unless it is mediated by religion, that, somehow, religions own goodness, as they own various treasures. Dawkins argues strongly for altruism as emerging in the process of evolution.
In other words, the idea that goodness is something churches, etc., possess and dole out, is just another takeover bid, and its pretensions look pretty unimpressive if one thinks of the situations of women, children and homosexuals, for instance.
All the same...
As a Congregationalist, I was taught that I must obey the church ‘as far as reason and conscience allow’. ‘Oh, good,’ I thought, ‘I needn’t take a blind bit of notice’. History is history, and how far the good aspects of the Enlightenment derive from Christianity – from religion, tout court, is now difficult to say.
But: why do we need religions to produce good civil society? We may agree that we need respect for the autonomy of individuals, for privacy, for personal creeds and opinions, for scope restricted only by the needs of others, never, never, for laws made for their own sake.
I fear greatly for our society and for our dearlybought freedoms. I see no hope – though, being alive, I must go with life, and live as if I had hope, as Shelley would say. Because I do not believe in the supernatural tenets of realist Christianity, and because I think I can see that only realist Christianity offers redemption, as distinct from a (forever out of date) pattern for everyday living as in Islam and Judaism, or a means of release, as in Hindu and Buddhist ‘religions’, I think I see that human life is tragic. Like the rabbits in Watership Down, constantly culled, who consoled themselves with tragic poetry, I fear that ‘tragic poetry’ is unlikely to become obsolete. It did, for the rabbits, once they understood their situation, but we and our situation are more complex. Sophisticated paganism, anyone?...
Anna Sutcliffe was an art teacher at various levels, latterly at Leeds Polytechnic. She has been a professional artist for 10 years. She is a long-standing member of SoF.