The Book of Books

by Melvyn Bragg

  Harrison quotes Hans Frei who, he says:correctly characterises the different role which biblical history was to assume in the 18th century when he observes that ‘It is no exaggeration to say that all across the theological spectrum the great reversal had taken place; interpretation was a matter of fitting the biblical story into another world with another story rather than interpreting that world into a biblical story.’ There were other worlds now, there were other stories, other religions; the great book of faith for the English-speaking peoples was under siege.

  Its use and its purpose could appear to have come to an end. The weapon of destruction, of course, was a book, by the leading star in the constellation of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume. In 1757, he wrote The Natural History of Religion. Hume seems to put the cap on it. All religions, he implied, were no more than made or socially constructed artefacts based on acceptable superstitions. For Hume, there was no primary religious sentiment or predisposition.

  He went back to the early Greeks who saw religion as best accounted for by the need to explain natural phenomena: thunder, lightning, storms, famine, plague, death – all, in days of limited natural science, most satisfyingly explained by imagining gods ‘up in the sky’ venting their wrath and, less often, displaying some kindness at the antics of mere humans. Hume wrote that ‘polytheism was the primary religion of man’.

  Reason, Hume argued, played no role in the development of religion. The origin of religion could be explained fully in ‘natural’, non-religious instincts – primarily fear and the ‘universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object, those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious’. In short, God was no more than a human father blown up to gigantic size and significance by fallible human beings who, at that stage, needed a simple explanation for complicated phenomena.

  For many intellectuals religion was all over. Yet, in a quite extraordinary comeback, the full power of the King James Bible was yet to be unleashed.

  The slow-motion crunch of ideas which rolled through Europe and America from the Reformation until the French Revolution was a time when thought and belief and society’s view of itself began on a journey of constant change which continues to this day. The King James Bible played many parts. It would be thought to be the stopper in the spring which, once removed by Hume and others, let flow a waterfall of liberated ideas. It could also be seen as a chameleon, forever changing its shape and its character to the demands of the time, or even the good shepherd, still guiding the new flocks though often unseen by them.

  It was not only an intellectual debate. There were the deeper economic causes for the growth of the Enlightenment which would become seismic when a cluster of unschooled men largely in the north of England invented what could be claimed to be the greatest of all the world revolutions – the Industrial Revolution. All these men were nonconformist Bible believers.

  But there were always strong intellectual currents as the peoples of Europe, particularly in Britain, and then in America, saw the well of humanist scholarship. This inspired opposition from the Christians. New Christian literature was opened up: esoteric writing from hermetic books, Neoplatonic writings and the Jewish Cabbala attracted the minds of those who saw another route by which the mystery of life could be apprehended.

  It was optimistic. Newton, among others, spent as much time and energy on Cabbalistic and other esoteric lore as he did on the study of mathematics. It was an awesome rearguard spectacle: this attempt to dig out the rare minerals from the past, not lose them, but turn them into gold while at the same time staring at a rational future head-on, both amazed and half blinded by what the sum and the sun of it promised.

  The importance of the Jews and Judaism to all of this is great. Were there several routes to Enlightenment? The old Book of Books was their book first. Their scholars refined their minds on disputations on the Pentateuch and the prophets; their poets on the psalmists.

  In 1492 the Jews suffered what has been described as their greatest single disaster since the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 when they were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. Settling in different countries, forging their own communities, some converting to Christianity for survival, others stubborn and magnificent in their fidelity, they were always a strong presence. This was most clearly seen in the work of Benedict de Spinoza, son of a Portuguese Jewish merchant in Amsterdam who, according to Diarmaid MacCulloch, had by the age of twenty-three ‘already questioned some of the basic principles of all Judaic religions: the prospect of immortality for human beings and the intervention of God in human affairs’. For this, in 1656, he was expelled from his synagogue in Amsterdam. But his ideas spread across Europe: he spoke for a new time. Sacred texts to him were ‘human artefacts’, writes MacCulloch: ‘venerable religious institutions were “relics of man’s ancient bondage”. The whole argument of the work was disposed to promote human freedom.’

  ‘The supreme mystery of despotism,’ wrote Spinoza, ‘its principal story, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion, to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation, and count it no shame, but the highest honour, to spend their blood and their lives for the glorification of one man.’ A later Jewish writer would describe religion as ‘the opium of the people’.

  The beat of liberty was strengthened and that became part of a mix in which, ironically, the King James Bible played a major role. It is one of the remarkable properties of this book that it was at one time a supporter of grim and cruel authoritarianism and at another a key begetter of democracy, a flagship for liberationists.

  Spinoza’s work is considered to be one of the leading causes of the recent widely publicised re-emergence of atheism.

  Thomas Hobbes, at about the same time as Spinoza, brutally attacked the Holy Trinity, undermined Christian doctrine and demolished the claims of the clergy. His work, too, went into the melting pot of a theological battle of ideas which was to determine the character of the modern age.

  It is useful to emphasise both how important the Bible was throughout the Enlightenment but also how comprehensively it was attacked. Perhaps the latter fortified the former. Did its enemies give it strength? In 1719 there appeared in print a pamphlet written thirty years before, but considered too outrageous to allow to be read by a wider readership. Called Treatise of the Three Impostors, it claimed, wrongly, to have been written by Spinoza. It certainly plagiarised his ideas and those of Thomas Hobbes. It indicted Moses, Jesus Christ and Mohammed as the three ‘impostors’. All three of their faiths were condemned. It said: ‘there are no such things in Nature as either God or Devil or Soul or Heaven or Hell . . . The Religious . . . are all of them except for some few ignorant dunces . . . people of villainous principles, who maliciously abuse and impose on the credulous populace.’ A view sometimes echoed today and in no less strident terms.

  The author might have been an exiled French Huguenot. As well as radical Jews, some of the Huguenot thinkers were in the vanguard of the attack on the roots of religion. What is new here, in The Three Impostors, is that Judaism, Christianity and Islam are being lumped together in order to be dismissed with one blow. All the ‘Children of Abraham’ were impostors and so were all their works. But it was Christianity and especially the Protestants who took most exception to this attack.

  As MacCulloch points out this was part of the ‘long process of moving Christian doctrine and practice from the central place in European life which it had enjoyed for more than a millennium, and placing it among a range of personal choices’.

  ‘Choice’ was an operative word. The English and the Dutch, in the late seventeenth century, began an exceptional climb to a more general wealth. Their fleets brought back goods from around the world. Manufacturing grew. Prosperity began to be democratised. Having things, possessing luxuries once the preserve of a
few aristocrats, and enjoying leisure enabled the ever rising and expanding middle classes to make choices never before available to so many. The Church had been the sole provider of so much: now it was only one of an increasing number. Devotional music, for example, was now performed outside churches and cathedrals and even written to be performed outside the Church – Handel’s Messiah began life in a Dublin concert hall in 1742. The words, from the King James Bible, still stir millions riding on the music they inspired.

  The Protestant Church, like other Christian Churches, appeared to be losing its grip on society and on thinking about society. John Locke, who examined the problems of consciousness, wrote that since the mind ‘hath no other immediate object but its own Ideas . . . it is evident that our knowledge is only conversant about them’ (my italics).

  Using the King James Bible, the Protestants fought back. They asserted and through the Scriptures set out to prove that the philosophy which could be sifted from their Bible was fully capable of entering the lists against the rationalists. There was and remains an obstinacy about the truth in the Book of the Word of God, a truth whose transcendent claims are thought to be ‘proven’.

  Its history has been devalued; its prophecies proved wrong; its morality contradictory and the abuse of its powers scandalous. Yet, despite the philosophies of Locke and Spinoza, Hobbes and Descartes, despite the German scholars of the nineteenth century’s assault on the credibility of the Scriptures, the faithful held to the notion of revelation, the experience of a sensation which will not be explained save by faith. Given the assault of the Enlightenment, the Scriptures, like the core of an army which refuses to surrender, retreated. They were to regroup and return, in the nineteenth century, with greater force than ever before.

  And they were not without philosophical allies. Immanuel Kant, for instance, argued that there were vital ‘Ideas’ beyond the possibility of experience: of these there were three – God, Freedom and Immortality. Not to be reached by reason, he asserted, but through conscience. ‘I had to deny knowledge,’ he wrote, ‘in order to make room for faith.’

  Perhaps the truly remarkable thing about the Enlightenment is not that it swept away for ever the King James Bible and all it stood for but that it failed to do so.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE MATTER OF RICHARD DAWKINS: THE NEW ENLIGHTENMENT

  Richard Dawkins is a popular figure in the New Enlightenment – today’s continuation of that eighteenth-century movement. He has introduced me to some of the scientific details of the world in a learned and exhilarating manner and I am in his debt. His book The God Delusion uses some of that knowledge but takes his Darwinian proselytising zest into the world of religion. The range of his reading deserves respect and his central argument – the case for atheism – is well made. His lack of faith is convincing. His commitment to evangelising his atheist message verges on fundamentalism. He is out for converts. He can be seen as an extension of the Enlightenment, taken to the extreme.

  Richard Dawkins takes on virtually all religions from all ages and attacks the root, purpose and meaning of religion itself. The God Delusion sets out rational proofs that God never existed and is not necessary. Dawkins’s concerns may seem too wide for the subject of this book. How can a mere 400 years in the history of one Bible, the book of one modest vessel of merely one of the world’s religions, haul up alongside the Dawkins Armada?

  He dwells in epochs and in thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of years. He swoops into neuroscience, calls up his encounters on the television documentary trail, quotes from a pack of fervent allies – admired and eminent writers, comedians, psychologists and other fellow scientists – acolytes all. A praetorian guard! An alpha team of atheists who, mentioned several times by Dawkins, are from the educated elite of our society and therefore to be looked up to in his implicit intellectual hierarchy.

  He preys on anecdotal evidence, often as insubstantial as some of the miracles, and he rather worships statistics with a touching trust in their authority. Now and again he brings us the delight of his primary skills as a world-class populariser of zoology.

  For many readers today, Richard Dawkins is the ‘noise’ about religion. His atheist fundamentalism has set an agenda. Others are hopping on his bandwagon. God and the Bible are once again in the stocks.

  In the process, many of the achievements which owe their origins to the King James Bible (achievements alongside its basic purpose of spreading the Protestant religion) have been diminished, or bypassed, or denied. There is now a very fashionable version, some might say a distortion of its history and its impact, which flows from the current ideology of atheism.

  In the furious effort to raze religion from the surface of the earth much else – that is to say much that religion generates which is not itself primarily religious – is being unjustly downgraded or ignored. The just and the unjust are lumped together. The only colours are black and white. It is oddly reminiscent of the most crude passage in the Old Testament.

  Dawkins has claimed today’s religious weather. There is his rather touching faith that all the problems in an area of life probed for meaning for millennia are now and for ever more solved by this new blinding light of atheism. And in the process the earth around those ancient congregations of knowledge has been scorched. I think Dawkins has made himself part of any and all religious debates and discussions, including the impact of the King James Bible.

  Einstein, approvingly quoted in The God Delusion, wrote: ‘I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, and not a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.’ I agree with that, as with his more direct ‘The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naïve.’ But also with ‘I am a deeply religious non-believer. This is a somewhat new kind of religion.’ I am also impressed by Darwin’s statement that his great idea of speciation did not discount the notion of a Creator. And there is still the big unanswered question: where and what was the specific origin of life, the first act of replication?

  There is also the persistent pursuit of a First Cause which still appears to be elusive. It may be discovered in the tabernacle of mathematics and physics. But at the moment that is not a racing certainty.

  Then there is Martin Rees, former President of the Royal Society, Astronomer Royal, and distinguished author of books on astrophysics. He is a believer in the eternal fact that there are mysteries we shall never solve, things we shall never know. I agree with that, too, as with his religious observance. Martin Rees says that he goes to church ‘out of loyalty to the tribe’.

  Richard Dawkins’s total lack of faith is far more straightforward. I sometimes feel that my lack of his lack is little more than an anchor of nostalgia. Is my respect for some of the aspects of Christianity little more than regret for days long gone? Is it ‘only’ a gravity pull of apparently inexpungable childhood memory and longing? But perhaps the child is father to the man and maybe that is even more significant than we give it credit for. What if there are things we see and feel and even ‘know’ in childhood that have truth, are insights that we cannot yet grasp, but fade away as the flesh ages and changes? The words ‘perhaps’ and ‘maybe’ must irritate the scalpelled Dawkins. But sometimes the world does seem more ‘real’ when it is fuzzy. I suppose I always come back to the belief that there is so much that we do not know that to close any door is a little hasty.

  My chief unease about Richard Dawkins is rooted in his own words. In the section ‘Childhood Abuse and the Escape from Religion’ he writes about the recent exposures of child abuse in the Church. ‘The Roman Catholic church,’ he writes, ‘has borne a heavy share of such retrospective opprobrium. For all sorts of reasons I dislike the Roman Catholic Church. But I dislike unfairness even more and I can’t help wondering whether this one institution has been unfairly demonised over the issue, especially in Ireland and America.’ He continues:I suppose some additional public resentment flows from the hypocrisy of pri
ests whose professed life is largely devoted to arousing guilt about ‘sin’. Then there is the abuse of trust by a figure in authority whom the child has been trained from the cradle to revere. Such additional resentments should make us all the more careful not to rush to judgement. We should be aware of the remarkable power of the mind to concoct false memories especially when abetted by unscrupulous therapists and mercenary lawyers . . . there’s gold in them long gone fumbles in the vestry.

  I cannot understand how he can or why he does rush away so lightly from the well-documented, widespread, proven and horrifying crimes of child abuse by Roman Catholic priests. It was covered up for years and clearly responsible for the ruin of lives, the pain and trauma visited on young boys and girls raped by the Catholic clergy. Of course, ‘the psychologist Elizabeth Loftus’ as he explains, has documented ‘how easy it is for people to concoct memories that are entirely false’. But surely that is not the main point here. He offers no evidence whatsoever of that being the case with the victims of child rape.

  I fear that he wants to deny the full scale and horror of these rapes to raise up his own argument that the Catholic religious vision of hellfire causes more ‘long term damage’. He has said the words in the Bible taught to children constitute ‘child abuse’. On the same scale as criminal and violent rape? This equalising is worrying. It reveals his lack of understanding at a common-sense level, his lack of proportion – evident elsewhere in his book – and even his lack of basic sympathy. These are relevant to a mind so set against faith. Were these assaults nothing but ‘fumbles in the vestry’? An unworthy and insulting snigger from a safe, smug vantage point.