Dominic Lawson, usually a lucid social and political commentator, has just broken an immutable rule to which there are no known exceptions:
Atheists must never, under any circumstances and whatever the provocation, talk about religion, and especially argue against it.
Whenever they do, they are absolutely guaranteed to sound stupid and vulgar, no matter how clever they are otherwise. Even if their names are Dave (as in Hume) or Manny (as in Kant), whenever they broach this particular subject they sound as dumb as any old Tom, Dick or Harry.
One reason for this is that people not driven to God by their faith seldom take the time to ponder and study religion deeply enough, and this is invariably communicated in the first couple of sentences they utter.
Granted, it’s impossible for a reasonably educated Westerner not to have a sketchy knowledge of Christianity. But if a little knowledge was a dangerous thing to Alexander Pope, a sketchy knowledge of Christianity is a downright deadly thing, especially when it isn’t lifted by intuitive faith.
The more complex and subtle the subject, the more brutally is the ignorance of it punished, and no subject even begins to approach the subtle complexity of Christianity. Hence an atheist who knows little about it, and understands even less, is bound to sound silly when offering his views on religion, and ten times so when arguing against it.
Dominic Lawson is a case in point. Not a stupid man by any means, he blithely, and possibly in a fit of journalistic hubris, violated the aforementioned rule, suffering the predictable consequences.
Actually, he admitted to being ignorant, perhaps deeming himself to be above ridicule, but more probably because he doesn’t even realise that what he admits to is indeed ignorance. To wit:
“But when someone says that he ‘loves the Prophet’ – or indeed, as American preachers are especially fond of intoning, that he ‘loves the Lord Jesus’ – those devoid of religious faith don’t just find this strange: we struggle to understand what that ‘love’ could feel like.”
Fair enough: such love, strangulated by quotation marks, is less instantly comprehensible than the feelings one has for one’s spouse or children. But people who ‘struggle to understand’ a subject should refrain from offering strong views on it, or especially from implying that this lack of grasp elevates them to a higher intellectual plateau.
Mr Lawson has a rather tasteless tendency to use newspaper articles to proclaim his love for his wife and children. In this instance he strongly implies that this emotion is superior to the one he ‘struggles to understand’.
Yet Christ unequivocally establishes the pecking order of love:
“If any man come to me, and not hate his father, and mother, and wife and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.”
This was a rhetorically emphatic expression of a postulate that later found sublime development in much theology and philosophy.
Any love is a particle of God’s love for man and, derivatively, man’s love for God. Since a part is by definition smaller than the whole, love for one’s mother or daughter exists on a lower plane and, in case of a conflict, must be sacrificed.
As Aquinas put it, “Love is the mother and root of the virtues… Love comes to permeate lower virtues.” And further: “When a human act does not conform to the standard of [divine] love, then it is not right, nor good, nor perfect.”
I’m not suggesting that Mr Lawson should read Summa Theologiae or, God forbid, believe a single word of it.
All I am saying is that it’s vulgar to dismiss a vast philosophical subject with a public-school sneer of “I struggle to understand…”, implying that one’s own understanding resides in the ultra range above this nonsense, whereas in fact it languishes way beneath even the infra range.
Mr Lawson proceeds to vouchsafe to us the information that he is married – happily! – to an ‘observant Catholic’, with whom he often disagrees on religion without, however, diminishing their nuptial bliss one iota. I must say I was pleasantly surprised at the news of Mrs Lawson’s piety.
Not having had the pleasure of meeting her personally, I’ve formed my judgement of her innermost convictions solely on the basis of her own writings. These suggest that she mainly worships in the temple of the Goddess Diana, as in the late Princess of Wales, of whom Mrs Lawson was a friend.
Be that as it may, the loving couple seem to disagree on the effect of, and inspiration behind, the symphonies of Anton Bruckner, which produce in Mr Lawson “admitted feelings of ecstasy”, rather than the somnolence these interminable works so often induce in lesser men.
Apparently Mrs Lawson ascribes her hubby-wubby’s ecstasy to some unwitting religious catharsis, while he objects that “those feelings are completely abstracted from notions of humanity and morality (let alone the composer’s faith).”
Judging by her friendship with Diana, I doubt that Mrs Lawson pitches her arguments at a particularly deep level. That is regrettable, for discussing such matters in a cursory way is a bit like pondering modern computers on the basis of the abacus.
Suffice it to say that to any serious philosopher of aesthetics such ‘complete abstraction’ would sound downright daft.
“Music is the moral law,” wrote Plato, and Aristotle added that this law was to be strictly enforced: “Any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole state… when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state always change with them.”
Agree or disagree, there isn’t a whiff of ‘abstraction’ there, and neither is one to be found in the works of Hegel, Kant, Schiller, Shaftsbury, Kames – well, of any aesthetic thinker of note.
Considering that the foundations of Western music were laid at a time when music was little more than liturgical accompaniment, this belief in ‘complete abstraction’ is at best naïve.
That is clear even before we’ve touched upon the nature of artistic inspiration in general and musical inspiration especially – or before we’ve talked about the intricate interplay between the inspiration of the composer, performer and listener.
Such matters ought to be discussed, never mind argued pro or con, seriously or not at all. Otherwise one runs the risk of coming across as, in Chesterton’s phrase, “the village atheist talking to the village idiot”. Even worse, the former can easily begin to sound like the latter.