Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion (25 page)

Windsor Castle (Royal Chapen England Headaches (“Good King Henry [VI]”)

Believers with painful dental issues, for instance, knew to travel to the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Rome, where they could touch the arm bones of
St Apollonia, the patron saint of teeth. Unhappily married women went to Umbria to visit the shrine of
St Rita of Cascia, patron saint of those with marital problems. Soldiers looking to embolden themselves before battle might commune with the bones of
St Foy, kept in a gold-plated reliquary in the abbey-church of Conques, in southwestern France. Women who were having difficulty breast-feeding could find comfort at the Shrine of the Holy Breast Milk in Chartres. And those with excessive lightning phobias were commended to the German town of Bad Münstereifel, where they could lay their hands on the relics of
St Donatus, renowned for relieving fears of fire and explosions.

On their arrival at the appropriate shrine, pilgrims would first head for the nearby shops that sold moulded wax models of the troublesome parts of themselves, from legs, ears and breasts to penises and even whole souls (in the form of babies). Once inside the shrines themselves, they would place their effigies on altars, tombs or caskets, kneel in prayer and beg the spirits of the saints for their help.

Afterwards, the pilgrims would repair to souvenir stalls. Following the declaration by the fourth-century theologian Cyril of Jerusalem that handkerchiefs which came into contact with the bodies of the martyrs would forever possess a supernatural power, these stalls had begun to carry plentiful supplies of linens. They also offered small glass vials containing dust from the floors around the saints' tombs, which could be
resorted to for assistance in moments of distress. A Benedictine monk named
Guibert of Nogent once reported that a friend who had accidentally swallowed a toad and nearly choked to death was saved by a teaspoonful of dust from the tomb of
St Marcel, Bishop of Paris. Most commonly, visitors were invited to acquire finely sculpted lead badges showing the face of the saint whose relics they had come to see. It was said of
Louis XI of France, who had stopped in at every notable shrine in his country, that his hat was ‘brim-full of images which he kissed whenever good or bad news arrived'.

Although few of us would today walk a hundred kilometres to seek help for a fear of lightning, travelling nevertheless remains at the heart of many secular ideas of fulfilment. Our trips retain a role in cementing important inner transitions. While we might call them valuable rather than holy, there are places which by virtue of their remoteness, solitude, beauty or cultural richness retain an ability to salve the wounded parts of us.

Unfortunately, we lack any reliable mechanism or method for identifying these rare and curative locations. Here again, as so often when it comes to our emotional needs in the secular world, we miss the structure once provided for us by religions. Travel agents see themselves as being responsible solely for handling logistical matters – booking connecting flights, negotiating discounts on plane tickets and hotel rooms – and make little effort to help customers find their way to destinations that might bring a targeted benefit to their inner selves. We need psychoanalytically astute travel agents who could
carefully analyse our deficiencies and match us up with parts of the world which would have the power to heal us – agents who would send us on travels to connect up with those qualities which we esteem but cannot generate in sufficient quantities at home.

We further suffer from a lack of shrines. Having arrived at our destination, we seldom know what to do with ourselves. We wander around in search of a centre. We long for a plausible crucible of significance, for somewhere,
anywhere
to go in order that we may touch the essence of the
genius loci, but in the absence of alternatives we usually end up listlessly touring a museum, ashamed of ourselves for the strength of our desire to go back to our hotel and lie down.

How much more therapeutic our journeys might be if they could include a visit to a secular local shrine or temple, a work of architecture that would define and concentrate the qualities of its surrounding setting. Inside, we could deposit wax versions of our anxieties and immaturities, attempting thereby to formalize the purpose of our trip – while outside, in a row of small retail spaces, talented artists would sell inspiring tokens of the transformative powers of their settings.

One such shrine might be dedicated to the energy of a capital city, another to the purifying calmness of the deserted tundra, a third to the promises of the tropical sun. These temples would offer homes to otherwise elusive genii locorum, and together teach us to regard travel as a means of existential healing, rather than merely a source of entertainment or relaxation.

4.
There is no need to catalogue here all the themes that a new generation of temples might take up. There is in the end room in the world for as many different kinds of temple as there are varieties of need.

The point is only to argue that we should revive and continue the underlying aims of religious architecture, by expressing these through secular temples designed to promote important emotions and abstract themes, rather than through sacred shrines dedicated to embodied deities.

No less than the church spires in the skyscapes of medieval Christian towns, these temples would function as reminders of our hopes. They would vary in terms of their style, dimensions and forms – they could range from huts to hangars, they could be made of recycled tyres or gold tiles, they could hang from the sides of office buildings or be buried in illuminated grottoes under the streets – but they would all be connected through the ancient aspiration of sacred architecture: to place us for a time in a thoughtfully structured three-dimensional space, in order to educate and rebalance our souls.

i. Books vs. Institutions

1.
When sceptics and atheists began their assaults on religion in the late eighteenth century, they did so primarily through the medium of books. They wondered in print whether a dead man could really roll back a tombstone and make his way unaided into the upper atmosphere, whether a young woman could be immaculately impregnated by a deity, whether battles could be won by the intercession of angels or earaches cured by contact with the shin bone of a martyred saint (Cornelius). And they tended to conclude their arguments by looking forward to the day when mankind might replace its superstitions with rationally based ideas, of the sort they admired in works of secular science, philosophy, literature and poetry.

Although these sceptics proved to be caustically entertaining critics of the faiths, they failed to appreciate the fundamental difference between themselves and their enemies: the latter were not relying primarily on the publication of
books
to achieve their impact. They were employing
institutions
, marshalling enormous agglomerations of people to act in concert upon the world through works of art, buildings, schools, uniforms, logos, rituals, monuments and calendars.

While laying out ideas in books – which might sell anywhere from a few hundred copies to a few hundred thousand at very best – may seem a noble enough ambition, the medium itself claims a dispiritingly meagre reach compared to the wide-ranging influence which institutions can wield in the
development and perpetuation of attitudes and behaviours. In his
Republic
,
Plato conveyed a touching understanding (born from experience) of the limits of the lone intellectual, when he remarked that the world would not be set right until philosophers became kings, or kings philosophers. In other words, writing books can't be enough if one wishes to change things. Thinkers must learn to master the power of institutions for their ideas to have any chance of achieving a pervasive influence on the world.

However, secular intellectuals have, unfortunately, long suffered from a temperamental suspicion of institutions, rooted in the Romantic worldview which has coloured cultural life since the nineteenth century.
Romanticism has taught us to mock the ponderousness and strictures of institutions, their tendencies to corruption and their tolerance of mediocrity. The ideal of the intellectual has been that of a free spirit living beyond the confines of any system, disdainful of money, cut off from practical affairs and privately proud of being unable to read a balance sheet.

If people's inner lives remain even today more likely to be influenced by the biblical prophets than by secular thinkers, it is due in large part to the fact that the latter have been consistently unwilling to create institutional structures through which their soul-related ideas might be successfully disseminated to a wider audience. Those with an interest in addressing the needs of the secular soul have typically lacked scale, stable conditions of employment and the capacity to transmit their views through the mass media. Instead, volatile individual practitioners run what are in effect cottage industries, while
organized religions infiltrate our consciousness with all the might and sophistication available to institutional power.

The modern world is not, of course, devoid of institutions. It is filled with commercial corporations of unparalleled size which have an intriguing number of organizational traits in common with religions. But these corporations focus only on our outer, physical needs, on selling us cars and shoes, pizzas and telephones. Religion's great distinction is that while it has a collective power comparable to that of modern corporations pushing the sale of soap and mashed potatoes, it addresses precisely those inner needs which the secular world leaves to disorganized and vulnerable individuals.

The challenge is hence to create – via a study of religious institutions – secular entities that could meet the needs of the inner self with all the force and skill that corporations currently apply to satisfying the needs of the outer.

2.
Among the fundamental lessons of religions as institutions are the importance of scale and the benefits that flow from being able properly to aggregate money, intelligence and status.

Whereas
Romanticism glorifies the achievements of singular heroes, religions know how much will be impossible if individuals act alone. Outside of an organization, we may now and then succeed in securing a brief spike of
fame for ourselves, but we will never be able to place our achievements on a stable footing, consistently replicate our insights or bridge our weaknesses. Sole authorship cannot be a logical long-term response to solving the complexities of significant issues. We should ask why in matters of the soul we continue to believe in cloistered, companionless methods of assembly that we long ago disavowed in relation to the manufacture of pharmaceuticals or aircraft.