How the Hitch Made Me Catholic
A pretty rubbish Catholic, but Catholic nonetheless.
I am, it must be said, a pretty dreadful Catholic, though I do pray and even go to mass from time to time. I hold that my many, many, many personal failings do not make me unfit to be a member of the Church: once, asked how he could behave so badly and still be Catholic, Evelyn Waugh said he would be a great deal worse if he were not. (‘Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being,’ he added.) And so it is with me.
We may not all find ourselves in Waugh’s position, groping for a path to ineffable, other-worldly experience or just a coherent moral system or community. Hilaire Belloc, for instance, connected his faith with ‘laughter and good red wine’. But I am almost certain that we human beings need the sacred, that is to say some kind of relationship to the divine. For we seem to search ceaselessly for those objects, practices and experiences that get us past the drama of our daily lives [and take us somewhere more meaningful]. It is telling, I think, that the first human monuments were built not for use but for beauty — that those living in a world not yet shaped by human hands, with all that world’s attendant threats and miseries, felt compelled not to be practical but to exalt the fantastically useless.
I am almost certain that we human beings need the sacred, that is to say some kind of relationship to the divine.
But it is practical, in a manner of speaking. Just as beautiful buildings get used again and again (while those built purely for use are torn down once their purpose is fulfilled), a sense of the sacred sustains people and communities regardless of who or where they are or what is going on around them. And the commonest way we experience the sacred is, of course, through religion, which exists, it seems to me, to contain, structure and, through art, poetry and music, make somewhat intelligible the raw feeling of coming face to face with reality. In doing this, religion binds communities to that thing — that reality, that consciousness, that ground of being or whatever — and so binds the community’s members together. (The root word of religion is religiere, ‘to bind’.) Per Pablo d’Ors: ‘Spirituality is the wine; religion is the cup.’
The core of all religion, as well as its embryo and basis is the experience of encountering that whatever-it-is, and all attempts to crystallise and explain that encounter, let alone extrapolate hard and fast rules about conduct from it, will inevitably be flawed, or at least incomplete and thus subject to revision. The tradition of Zen Catholicism exists in part to help Christians, whose rich mystical tradition has fallen by the wayside, to reconnect to the experience of God, or whatever you want to call Him or it, and get beyond the view of religion as some kind of political ideology. The whole essence of Zen is experiential. And it is important to note that religion does not have sole ownership of this experience of the sacred. We can feel it in nature (as St. Francis and the geneticist Francis Collins did) or through charity (as Dorothy Day did) or out of the blue, walking down the street (as Thomas Merton did). Since Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God (predicting, rightly, that the subsequent search for values would lead to bloody conflict on a scale never before seen), we have tried to get back the religious experience through art, culture, Geist, etc. (Terry Eagleton writes well on this.) But all the trappings of religion — the architecture, art, music, smells and bells, and, till recently, dead languages — remains a powerful means of putting us in the right state to have those intimations of transcendence.
Since Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, we have tried to get back the religious experience.
Let me just get the small matter of whether God exists out of the way (lest I be accused of ducking the question). The word means all sorts of things to all sorts of people, and I am mindful of St. Augustine’s saw, that ‘Si comprehendis, non est Deus’ (‘If you understand it; it isn’t God’). So I will just say that what we commonly called ‘God’ seems to me to be a man with a white beard and perhaps a fetching white toga sitting on a cloud, dictating human affairs. This is the God of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens: easy to dismiss, particularly in front of a crowd of starstruck fans or teens on YouTube who agreed with you to begin with. The arguments made by the ‘Four Horsemen’, whom I very much admire, by the way, are well-rehearsed and have been known for two centuries and probably longee. In fact, they bring nothing new to arguments made by Hume, Voltaire, Diderot and Kant save for fresh examples of religiously motivated (or religiously justified) wrongdoing — though Hitchens’ charisma and flair for language did and does make him fun to watch. The Enlightenment thinkers, moreover, saw for the most part that the knowledge set out by religion was not propositional in nature but dispositional, not intellectual but experiential. The mathematician and scientist Blaise Pascal (of ‘Pascal’s wager’ fame) advised us, as Iain McGilchrist puts it in The Matter with Things, ‘not to begin from propositions themselves but from adopting a way of life that embodies the disposition we seek to emulate: practical, embodied wisdom of the highest degree.’
And this takes me to my point. It is precisely because of the Hitch, as his friend Martin Amis called him, that as an adult I returned, in fits and starts and somewhat awkwardly, to Holy Mother Church, having long abandoned it as a relic and still appalled by its failure to deal ruthlessly with the evil men who had infiltrated it and betrayed the children in their charge. It had struck me upon hearing Hitchens give one of those lovely, lyrical harangues that he was badly missing the point, or at least talking about something else — the crimes of political religion. Sometimes he was just plain wrong. Religion, despite what you might be led to believe, plays an overwhelmingly positive role in people’s lives. Indeed, the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Health, which looks at over 3,000 studies of religion and well-being, shows believers are less stressed, worried, sad, lonely, selfish … you get the picture. The news gives us the opposite impression; but then, the news deals mainly in exceptions to the rule. It would be too bold, I think, to suggest that the alienation, deaths of despair, and all the sundry misery around is rooted in our failure to acknowledge the spiritual side of human life: I am not mad about giving simple causes for complex effects. But it might nonetheless strike the atheist materialist mind (if not the religious one) as mildly paradoxical that we are, by historical standards, so rich and healthy yet so spectacularly gloomy all the time.
Religion, despite what you might be led to believe, plays an overwhelmingly positive role in people’s lives.
Anyway, like the writer Timothy Egan, author of A Pilgrimage to Eternity, I was bored of sitting in the squishy middle of things, neither rejecting nor affirming, and thought I owed it to this millennia-old institution to see what it had to say for itself. And so I followed Pascal’s advice, set aside my more analytical mode of attending to the world, and did my best to put myself in a state of something like active receptivity. And I went to mass. And now I go with increasing regularity. I say sorry for my sins, sing songs, send prayers up for the people I am fond of, celebrate the Eucharist, listen to the Word, wish my fellows well, and take part in all those embodied metaphors that we call ritual. Has my life changed? Hard to tell, really. I am manifestly not a saint, as I have already said, though maybe I have become a bit nicer. Maybe. I would say that I have a greater sense of proportion. It is difficult to get wound up about things when you have consciously put yourself sub specie aeternitatis, as the philosophers say: under the aspect of eternity.
The Hitch half-seriously (and amusingly) promoted religious education in schools, saying that in his view, there was no better way to mass-produce atheists. But there may be — may be — no better way to mass-produce believers than subjecting them to the cold, mechanical, materialist (if often beautifully described) view of our reality implied by the New Atheists, whose vision of ever more human flourishing and ‘progress’ (whatever that means) seems almost cute in its naïveté. Perhaps it would just firm up what they think already. But it might inspire just a tingle of curiosity.
