Monkland - Meanjin, Autumn 2010
Nick Terrell
Meanjin Quarterly - Autumn 2010 (vol. 69, no.1)
Melbourne University Press. $Au 24.99
Here come the spectres, here come the tempting voices. Is this the desert? Is this the devil, whispering in the wilderness?
What? My prayers, my tears, my physical suffering, my flights of passion, can all this have rushed away towards a lie … into space … uselessly – like the cry of a bird, like an eddy of dead leaves!
Oh, no! Above it all there must be someone, a great soul, a Lord, a father, whom I worship in my heart and who must love me!
(from Flaubert’s Temptation of St Antony)
Whether it arises from the hysteria of a starving saint, the existential loneliness of a purposeless lifetime, or a sober intellectual and aesthetic preference for authority and systematic moral hierarchies, religious feeling defies rational contradiction.
Listen carefully to these assorted strains: pluralism, polemic, memoir, tribute and criticism; a collective resistance to fundamentalist distortions of faith, spirituality, religion and religiosity. Hushed cloisters, noisy cloisters – solitary meditation, monastic asceticism, factional sectarianism, churchmen, scholastics, heretics, apostates and relapsing Catholics.
From St Antony to Stella Glorie: “My mother attends a regular Friday-night gathering called the Wandering Family and drags my father and me along. She starts speaking in tongues. The first time she does it I want to sink my fist into her face and scream at her.” Traumatised by the sacrilegious undertone of Ghostbusters, freaking out on a cocktail of joints and Revelations, pacified by her mother’s assurance that God is a God of Love and not the architect of imminent apocalypse: ‘Who Ya Gonna Call?’
Too much angst? Invoke the ‘Uroboros.’ Eternal return, cyclical innocence, unspoiled wonder. A little girl is separated from her family in a busy museum - as her parents and brother fan out to find her they move silently past a series of icons, ceremonial relics and fetishes. 
Bruce Mutard’s graphic short begins in front of a display of prehistoric human community and ends with a very modern family heading for the carpark. All is well again, the daughter had been led astray and transfixed by a beautiful golden Buddha. Religious feeling? Aesthetic thrill? And the artefacts, the Egyptian iconography, the Chinese dragon, the Taoist mini-shrine, imitation temples, dinosaur skeletons and evolution themed dioramas - is this an incompatible clutter of contradictory symbols, or the collected evidence of a common social tendency, on proud display in a secular, humanist temple?
In “Heavens Below: The Religious Impulse in a Secular World,” John Potts lets a bit of air out of his former student peers: middle-class ascetic ultra-Marxists and self-mortifying socialists who would have scorned doctrinaire religiosity as superstition and Christian good works as mindless. Potts insists on the parallel but gives his middle class peers none of the respect which he plainly feels for traditional exponents of religious behaviour. Religious behaviour has fascinated the staunchest atheists and deists alike, but religious behaviour came well in advance of religion. And the religious traditions which Potts’ peers recoiled from, but ended up mirroring, are in their own way manifestations of a broader human tendency to create conceptual communities of common interest.
The common interest of one group has often been founded on the exclusion of others, and this is where the strength of religious feeling and the potency of the gratifications it can bring tend to generate frictions. Paul Mitchell explores the recent attempts of Australian novelists to come to grips with these frictions as they manifest among a population of relaxed and comfortable citizens, existing in the nebulous social climate of perpetual mild alert. ‘A Novel Approach to Religion’. Mitchell’s essay catches the spirit of combined intellectual and moral endeavour which Jane Grant pays tribute to in ‘A Critical Mind: On Sam Goldberg.’ One of Goldberg’s own essays, reprinted from the 1950s, consolidates an atmosphere of rigour and scrutiny and exemplifies a past dignity of the scholastic calling. Devotees, mentors, novitiates. Phil Brown’s ‘Memories of a Mentor’ relives a casual apprenticeship in poetry under the guiding influence of a kind patriarch, Bruce Dawe. The critically minded are clapping away in their monastic cells. A vicarious gathering of the sects is underway. Mckenzie Wark preaches the ideology of giftware, modern communities of interest, collective authorship.
Helen Barnes-Bulley has been stung by an acquaintance’s claim: “if you don’t believe in God then you really can’t have the same response to a religious work of art as someone who does believe in God.”
A response that sees religious art solely in the context of its participation in a theological discourse is not the kind of privileged insight that would provoke much envy from anyone with an aesthetic appetite. Barnes-Bulley has been “hopelessly in love with paint” most of her life, and this challenge to her receptivity needs some working through. In “The Book of Famous Paintings”, she carries the question with her through the churches of France and Italy and seeks out the underpinnings of her own responses. She is struck by a carved detail atop a pillar in a church:
…it is the donkey that is a revelation with its expression of such benign dutifulness; he is just as much a personality in the carving as the human figures. I wondered if he was the donkey that drew the artist on his cart to work at the cathedral each day; only a man who loved and cared for animals could have made such a creature.
Barnes-Bully is sincere in one sense but also deliberately provocative in her praise of the donkey over human figures with far greater significance in this carving’s religious narrative. That last insistence, though, surely amounts to the same kind of approach to inspiration and aesthetic meaning which she is arguing against in refuting the suggestion that only a religious person can truly appreciate religious art. This idea - that only an artist who loves and cares for animals could have invested this humble supporting player in the nativity with the poignant dignity Barnes-Bully registers – supports an attitude to artistic creation and receptivity which actually looks a lot like her religious associate’s hollow claim.
Jeff Sparrow looks to be plotting a middle course between fundamentalist atheists and deists, but he aims to get things off with a bang by taking a sharp rhetorical pin to the most recent barrage balloon of atheism, Christopher Hitchens. Sparrow rails against Hitchens’ fatuous, posturing address to last year’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas: “the umpteenth plonking repetition of atheistic arguments already old a century ago” – and decries the racist, anti-Islamist foundations of his polemics against theism. Hitchens is a false prophet full of “Unholy Enthusiasm,” and along with Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, is leading a tribe of glib sophisticates into the desert.
Rather than smugly telling ourselves that the new religionists can’t grasp our clever arguments, should we not consider another, less palatable, alternative: that they understand quite well what secular liberalism offers – and they don’t find it very attractive?
That kind of clarity cuts both ways. It’s unfortunate that the apostles of atheism tend to give credence to the common presumption that those who opt for a secular liberal worldview do so in a spirit of rejection and denial (of religion, faith, etcetera) rather than on the grounds of preference of approval for the values it upholds. Sparrow is putting the naysayers in the corner:
Insofar as religion is, in certain contexts, on the rise, it reflects, more than anything else, the failure of secular alternatives in the face of intolerable conditions. That is what makes the self-satisfaction of the New Atheists so repulsive.
The fact is that most atheists do arrive at unbelief by rejecting faith – they are discrediting an authority they had been taught or encouraged to believe had a claim on them. In disputing this claim they seem to confirm again that faith is the central orientation point in this broader debate about values – and that’s probably their worst crime (one they often regret, but will repeat ad infinitum).
It’s strange that Sparrow should try to point out the major blind-spot of atheist arguments against faith by way of the suggestion (above) that religion can be a sound intellectual preference. I don’t think you can choose to believe, and a religious person who has come to their affiliation through this kind of preference for the tenets of a faith over the tenets of secular liberalism, is not truly a theist. In spite of that, they might be a much better exponent of the particular faith they have committed to, than someone who believes in its supernatural authority. You can choose to belong to a church or to follow its teachings, but you can’t choose to believe in God. Sparrow is standing up for some kind of sensitivity to the wide range of human experience on the one hand (there are more things in heaven and earth) but he is also, I think, charging the New Atheists with a kind of irresponsible and mischievous ostentation. The over-inflated demagogues of atheism are throwing up a dust cloud that has obscured better and more productive arguments that we could be having about religion, religious feeling and secularism.
The core of Sparrow’s argument seems all pluralist and unitarian – but he started with a polemical bang and he ends with another. You see, clanging on about atheism to Australians isn’t dangerous, and it hasn’t been dangerous for over 100 years. Sparrow’s got a sharper sense for peril: “try speaking up against the Israeli apartheid state and its Australian partisans, on the basis that a modicum of justice for the Palestinians would do more to counter Islamism.” Sparrow can’t resist this final turning of the tables on the egregious Hitchens (Hitchens offers a version of Islam as the oogabooga man, and Sparrow counters with this cameo of Islam as the victim of Zionist imperialism) but his closing thrust begs a curious question. Sparrow has held the floor for a good ten pages, and in his own lively polemical way has concentrated on skewering the New Atheists … a bunch of straw men peddling crude and rehashed arguments. Has Sparrow been wasting our time? Why didn’t he speak of this more categorically imperative topic earlier, and at length. Is this topic too dangerous for Sparrow to meet head on?
A number of the pieces in this meaty volume are unified by their fascination with the way that many different forms of religious feeling and selfless devotion can be seen to originate from common behavioural roots. John Potts gestures to some conceptual similarities between Marxism and Christianity, and certainly they are both utopian systems, but their foundations (the basis of any culture they might sustain) are simply, literally incompatible. However comparable the broad patterns might be, to say that a devout Marxist and a devout Christian are each committed to the same patterns of religious behaviour ignores the fact that each, if given the opportunity to shape the world in accordance with their beliefs, would bring about very different results. “Acknowledging the religious foundations of secular thought has the advantage of situating that thought within a broader and deeper historical context” (something like Mutard’s museum?).
Potts implies that religious foundations are point zero; that in comparison to ‘secular thought’ there is something natural and organic about religion. But organised religions as we know them today surely also have their origins in historical moments of political and social reaction against something that existed before them (religion is not just unfortunately co-opted by “political power and indoctrination and social control,” as Barnes-Bully suggests in passing, it exists inevitably in symbiosis with these things). The debt of secularism to religious thought is undeniable, but that debt is parlayed backwards to every preceding form of social organisation and community.
But it was good to be in Monkland, I learned a song there too, a rondeau. Alexandra Bates led the singing:
Can you hear the strokes of titanium white?
Shh – we’re trying to paint the quiet.
We’re mixing a pallet of snow,
Ice lilies on an Antarctic plateau.
Can you hear the white?
Then things got shamanic. I returned to my cell, seeking sanctuary from visions of goats and gaping mouths. I dreamt of St Antony on the Antarctic plateau, he stared into the icy infinity and began to count the snowflakes. He did it to stifle temptation.
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