The Aristos

by John Fowles

  10 To take these incredible aspects from his life does not diminish Jesus; it enhances him. If Christians were to say that these incredible events and the doctrines and rituals evolved from them are to be understood metaphorically, I could become a Christian. I could believe in the Virgin Birth (that the whole of evolution, of whatever is the case, fathers each child); in the Resurrection (for Jesus has risen again in men’s minds); in the Miracles (because we should all like to perform such generous acts); in the Divinity of Christ and in Transubstantiation (we are all complementary one to another, and all to ‘God’); I could believe in all these things that at present excommunicate my reason. But traditional Christians would call this lack of faith.

  11 Intelligent Athenians of the fifth century knew their gods were metaphors, personifications of forces and principles. There are many signs that the athenianization of Christianity has begun. The second coming of Christ will be the realization that Jesus of Nazareth was supremely human, not supremely divine; but this will be to relegate him to the ranks of the philosophers and to reduce the vast apparatus of ritual, church and priesthood to an empty shell.

  12 It is not what Jesus made of mankind, but what mankind made of him.

  13 The Christian churches, contrary to the philosophy of Jesus himself, have frequently made their own self-continuance their chief preoccupation. They have fostered poverty, or indifference to it; they have forced people to look beyond life; they have abused the childish concept of hell and hell-fire; they have supported reactionary temporal powers; they have condemned countless innocent pleasures and bred centuries of bigotry; they have set themselves up as refuges and too often taken good care that outside their doors refuge shall be needed. Things are better now; but we have not forgotten that things were not better till history presented the churches with a clear choice: reform or die.

  14 A similar scramble to clean up the house is taking place today in Christian theology; but it comes too late. There are ‘advanced’ Christian thinkers who propose a god not very different from the one I have described earlier. They wish to humanize Jesus, to demythologize the Bible, to turn Christianity into something bizarrely like an early Marxism. Everything we once understood to be Christianity is now, we are told, a metaphor of a deeper truth. But if we can now see this deeper truth, then the metaphor is unnecessary. The new theologians are sawing the branches they sit on; and they are bound to fall.

  15 Worst of all, the churches have jealously caged Jesus. What right have they to say that he cannot be approached except through them? Must I believe in the Olympians and practise ancient Greek religious rituals before I can approach Socrates? The church has become not the body and spirit of Jesus; but a screen and barrier round him.

  16 Jesus was human. Perhaps he believed he was all that he claimed to be; but that he was not all that he claimed to be is trivial, not vital, because he was human; and because the essence of his teaching does not depend on his divinity.

  17 There is no redemption, no remission; a sin has no price. It cannot be bought back till time itself is bought back.

  18 Children learn very early the double vision a dogmatic church induces. They pray to God and nothing happens. They learn that there are two modes of behaviour, an absolute one in church, and a relative one outside. They are taught science and then ordered to believe what is palpably unscientific. They are told to revere the Bible, and yet even they can see that it is in one way a rag bag of myths, tribal gibberish, wild vindictiveness, insane puritanism, garbled history, absurdly one-sided propaganda – and in another way a monument of splendid poetry, profound wisdom, crowned by the richly human story of Jesus.

  19 It is not the child adopting double standards who is to blame; it is the churches that perpetuate them. To claim of something that it belongs to a special category of absolute truth or reality is to pronounce its death sentence: there is no absolute truth or reality.

  20 After Platonism, and surrounded by the puerilities of the debased classical religion of the later Roman civilization, Mediterranean man was bound to develop a monotheistic and ethically-inclined counter-religion. A kind of Jesus and a kind of Christianity was as inevitable as was a kind of Marx and Marxism in the later stages of the Industrial Revolution.

  21 Humanity is like a tall building. It needs stage after stage of scaffolding. Religion after religion, philosophy after philosophy; one cannot build the twentieth floor from the scaffolding of the first. The great religions prevent the Many from looking and thinking. The world would not at once be a happier place if they looked and they thought; but this is no defence of dogmatic religions.

  22 Does one snatch a cripple’s crutch away because it is not the latest sort? Is it even enough to put the latest sort in his hands? He may not know how to use it. But this is not an argument against the latest sort of crutch.

  23 Religious faith: mystery. Rational faith: law. The fundamental nature of reality is mysterious – this is a scientific fact. In basing themselves on mystery, religions are more scientific than rational philosophies. But there are mysteries and mysteries; and Christianity has foolishly tried to particularize the fundamental mystery. The essential and only mystery is the nature of what the Christians call God or Providence. But the church has introduced a fairground of pseudo-mysteries, which have no relation to truth, but only to the truth that mystery has power.

  24 Yet man is starved of mystery: so starved that even the most futile enigmas have their power still. If no one will write new detective stories, then people will still read the old ones. Virgin birth makes Jesus unique; the mystery of this impudent uniqueness is so pleasurable that we cannot resist it.

  25 In most parts of the world the horse and cart has been superseded by the automobile. But we do not say of the horse and cart that it is untrue, or that simply because the automobile is generally more useful and faster all horses and carts should be abolished. There are still places where the horse and cart is indispensable. Where it is used and useful it is evolutionally true.

  26 Militant anti-religious movements are based on this mechanization fallacy: that the most efficient machine must be the best. But it is the most effective machine in the circumstances that is the best.

  27 If the necessity of the situation is that it should be softened, misted, muffled, then Christianity is good. There are many such situations. If to a man dying of cancer Christianity makes dying of cancer an easier death, not all the arguments of all the anti-Christians could make me believe Christianity, in this situation, is not true. But this truth is a kind of utility, and in general I think it probable that clear glass is of greater utility than frosted.

  28 For every Christian who believes in all the dogma of his church, there are a thousand who half believe because they feel a man should believe in something. If the old religions survive, it is because they are convenient receptacles of the desire to believe; and because they are, though poor ones, ports; and because they at least try to satisfy the hunger for mystery.

  29 All the old religions cause a barbarous waste of moral energy; ramshackle water mills on a river that could serve hydro-electric dynamos.

  30 All gods alleged to be capable of intervention in our existence are idols; all images of gods are idols; all prayer to them, all adoration of them, is idolatry.

  31 Gratitude for having been born and for existing is an archetypal human feeling; so is gratitude for good health, good fortune and happiness. But such gratitude should be ploughed back into the life around one, into one’s manner of being; not thrown vaguely into the sky or poured into that most odious of concealed narcissisms, prayer. Religion stands between people’s gratitude and the practical uses they might put its energy to. One good work is worth more than a million good words; and this would be true even if there were an observing and good-mark-awarding god ‘above’ us.

  32 I reject Christianity, along with the other great religions. Most of its mysteries are remote from the true mystery. Though I admire the founder, though I admire man
y priests and many Christians, I despise the church. It is because men want to be good and do good that it has survived so long; like Communism, it is inherently parasitical on a deeper and more mysterious nobility in man than any existing religion or political creed can satisfy.

  LAMAISM

  33 Life is pain, suffering, betrayal, catastrophe, and even its pleasures are delusions; the wise man teaches himself to empty his mind of all that is mere triviality, futile flux, and thus learns to live in a state of mystical inward peace. Man is brought into the world in order that he may, by ascesis, train himself to withdraw from it, and thus, it is claimed, transcend it. So the lama refuses to participate in society; it is by extirpating his animal desires and his vain life in society that demonstrates true freedom. He does not resist the nemo; he invites it.

  34 Recent world history has driven many in all the continents into this view of life. Few can withdraw totally from their society. But there is a secular lamaism that is widespread. These semi-lamas can be identified as follows: they refuse to commit themselves in any meaningful way on any social or political or metaphysical questions, and not because of genuine scepticism, but because of indifference to society and aU that is connected with it.

  35 A semi-lama is one who thinks that to ask nothing of his fellow men permits him to insist that nothing shall be asked of him; as if, in the human context, to contract no debts is to owe nothing. But we aU drift on the same raft. There is only one question. What sort of shipwrecked man shall I be?

  36 Freedom of will can be increased only by exercise But the only place where such exercise can be got is in society; and to opt out of that is to opt out of opting. If I jump off a high building I prove I can jump; but I am the one who most needs the proof. The proof is meaningless if I cannot apply it. Why prove Pythagoras to a corpse?

  37 The lama allows his desire to be free of society to dupe him into thinking he is indeed free. He no longer sees the prison walls. Nothing will make him believe they exist.

  38 There is in oriental lamaism an acute apprehension of the nature of ‘God’. But the mistake is to use this apprehension as a model for humans to copy. Lamaism tells us to make a sustained attempt to achieve oneness with ‘God’, or nothingness. Living, I must learn not to be, or to be as if I was not; individual, I must lose all individuality; I must totally withdraw from all life and yet be in total sympathy with all life. But if we were all lamas it would be as if we were all masturbators: life would end. ‘God’ is in contrast to us; it is our pole. And it is not by imitating it, as the Tao Te Ching recommends, that we honour it; nor does it need honouring.

  39 The semi-lama is usually a sensitive person who finds himself frustrated and horrified by the futility and ugliness of life around him. His lamasery is commonly art, which he loves and regards in a characteristically narcissistic and barren way. He enjoys form rather than content; style rather than meaning; vogue rather than social significance; fastidiousness rather than strength. He will often get more pleasure from the minor arts than the major ones, and more pleasure from minor works of art than from major ones. He becomes a connoisseur, a collector, a hypersensitive critic. A taster, a tongue, a palate, or an eye, an ear; and all the rest of his humanity becomes atrophied and drops away.

  40 It is true that lamaism, especially in such forms as Zen Buddhism, has a great deal to tell us about the enjoyment of objects as objects; about the beauty of the leaf and the beauty of the leaf in the wind. But this perfecting of the aesthetic sense and this clarifying of the inner metaphor in each, cannot be taken as a way of life. It may be, almost certainly is, a constituent of the good life; but it is not the good life.

  41 Lamaism, the withdrawal into self-preoccupation or self-enjoyment, is the perennial philosophy; that is, the philosophy against which all others (like Chris-tianty) are erected. To the extent that we have to nourish self in order to remain healthy psychologically it is as important as the food we eat. But clearly it will flourish most when the self, or individual, feels most defeated and most in danger. The most frequent argument in defence of it then is that someone must guard and preserve the highest standards of living. In the lives of even the most selfish castes and elites there is something good in itself; but this is surely the most relative goodness of all. Early Sevres porcelain is beautiful; but it was not made only of clay, it was made also of the emaciated flesh and bones of every French peasant who starved during the period of its making. All the luxuries we buy ourselves are paid for in the same coin; no economic or cultural plea is sound in the final analysis. Under all its names – hedonism, epicureanism, ‘beat’ philosophy – lamaism is a resource of the defeated. There might be worlds and systems of existence where it was tenable; but not in one like ours, in a permanent state of evolutionary war.

  HUMANISM

  42 Humanism is a philosophy of the law, of what can be rationally established. It has two great faults. One lies in its inherent contempt for the mysterious, the irrational and the emotional. The other is that humanism is of its nature tolerant: but tolerance is the observer’s virtue, not the governor’s.

  43 The characteristic movement of the humanist is to withdraw; to live on the Sabine farm; to write Odi profanum vulgus, et arceo. A humanist is someone who sees good in his enemies and good in their philosophies; he sees good in his enemies because he cannot accept that they are freely evil, and he sees good in their philosophies because no philosophy is without some reason and some humanity. He lives by the golden mean, by reason, by the middle of the road, by seeing both sides; he captures respect, but not the imagination.*

  44 It is conventionally held that ancient polytheistic humanism collapsed because it was unrealistic, a highly artificial system. But there is a sense in which it was realistic, as we should expect in any religion springing from Greek origins. The gods on Olympus at least represented actual human attributes, or varying and often conflicting archetypal human tendencies; while the Hebraic system – the uniting of desirable (moralistic) human attributes into one god – was a highly artificial procedure. In many ways the Greek system is the more rational and intelligent; which perhaps explains why it has been the less appealing. The Hebrew god is a creation of man; and the Greek gods are a reflection of him.

  45 We often forget to what an extent the Renaissance, and all its achievements, sprang from a reversion to the Greek system. The relationship between paganism and freedom of thought is too well established to need proof; and all monotheistic religions are in a sense puritan in tone – inherently tyrannical and fascistic. The great scientific triumphs of the Greeks, their logic, their democracy, their arts, all were made possible by their loose, fluid concepts of divinity; and the same is true of the most recent hundred years of human history.

  46 But the opposition is not, of course, simply between a ‘liberal’ polytheism and an ‘illiberal’ monotheism. Religion has always been for man intensely a field of self-interest; and it is plainly harder to bargain with, or blindly believe in, several gods than one. A certain scepticism and agnosticism, so characteristic of the best Greek thought, is a natural product of polytheism; just as emotional enthusiasm and mystic fervour breed from its opposite. This conflict between scepticism and mysticism long pre-dates the Christian era.

  47 Like modern humanists, the ancient Milesians did not believe in an afterlife or in any god. Then, in the seventh and eighth centuries before Christ, came the Orphic revivalist invasion with its Irish stew of redemption, salvation and predestined grace, and all the power of its wild mysteries. By the fifth century the battle between Orphic mysticism and Milesian scepticism was permanent. There has never been peace since between Dionysus and Apollo, and there never will be.*

  48 Nonetheless, periods of history come when it seems clear which serves the general need best. Monotheism saw man through the dark ages that followed the collapse of the Roman empire; but today the benevolent scepticism of humanism seems better suited to our situation. What is evident is that it is ridiculous to regard this
opposition as a struggle or battle, in which one side must be defeated and the other victorious; instead it should be regarded as the nature of the human polity, the sine qua non of being in society and in evolution.

  49 A Christian says: ‘If all were good, all would be happy’. A socialist says: ‘If all were happy, all would be good’. A fascist says: ‘If all obeyed the state, all would be both happy and good’. A lama says: ‘If all were like me, happiness and goodness would not matter’. A humanist says: ‘Happiness and goodness need more analysis’. This last is the least deniable view.

  SOCIALISM

  50 Napoleon once said: ‘Society cannot exist without inequality of wealth, and inequality of wealth cannot exist without religion’. He was not of course speaking as a theorist of history, but justifying his Concordat with the Vatican; however, this Machiavellian statement suggests admirably both the aims and the difficulties of socialism.