Religion for Atheists

IV

Education

‘The object of universities is not to make skilful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings’—John Stuart Mill. (illustration credit 4.1)

i. What We Get Taught

1.

A busy high street in north London. In a neighbourhood studded with Cypriot bakeries, Jamaican hairdressers and Bengali takeaways, stands the campus of one of Britain’s newest universities. It is dominated by a twelve-storey asymmetrical steel tower which houses, along a series of corridors painted a vivid purple and yellow, the lecture theatres and seminar rooms of the Department of the Humanities.

Across the university, 200,000 undergraduates are enrolled on 400 different degree programmes. This particular department was inaugurated just a few months ago by a minister for education and a cousin of the Queen, in a ceremony now commemorated on an engraved granite block embedded in a wall near the toilets.

‘A home for “The best that has been said and thought in the world” ’, reads the plaque, borrowing Matthew Arnold’s famous definition of culture. The quote must have struck a chord with the university, for it reappears in the undergraduate admissions handbook and in a mural by the drinks dispenser in the basement cafeteria.

There are few things that secular society believes in as fervently as education. Since the Enlightenment, education — from primary level through to university — has been presented as the most effective answer to a range of society’s gravest ills; the conduit to fashioning a civilized, prosperous and rational citizenry.

A look at the degree courses offered by the new university reveals that over half are intended to equip undergraduates with practical skills, the sort required for successful careers in mercantile, technological societies: courses in chemistry, business, microbiology, law, marketing and public health.

But the grander claims made on behalf of education, the sort one reads of in prospectuses or hears about in graduation ceremonies, tend to imply that colleges and universities are more than mere factories for turning out technocrats and industrialists. The suggestion is that they have a yet higher task to fulfil: they may turn us into better, wiser and happier people.

As John Stuart Mill, another Victorian defender of the aims of education, put it: ‘The object of universities is not to make skilful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings.’ Or, to go back to Matthew Arnold, a proper cultural education should inspire in us ‘a love of our neighbour, a desire for clearing human confusion and for diminishing human misery’. At its most ambitious, he added, it should engender nothing less than the ‘noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it’.

2.

What unites such ambitious and beguiling claims is their passion — and their vagueness. It is seldom clear how education could turn students towards generosity and truth and away from sin and error, though it is typically hard to do anything other than passively lend one’s assent to this inspiring notion, given its familiarity and its sheer beauty.

Nevertheless, it would be no injustice to examine the high-flown rhetoric in the light of certain realities on the ground, as revealed by an ordinary Monday afternoon in the Faculty of the Humanities in the modern university in north London.

The choice of department is not coincidental, for the transformative and lyrical claims made on behalf of education have almost always been connected to the humanities rather than endocrinology or biostatistics. It is the study of philosophy, history, art, the classics, languages and literature that has been thought to yield the most complex, subtle and therapeutic dimensions of the educational experience.

In a corner classroom on the seventh floor, a group of second-year history students are following a lecture about agricultural reform in eighteenth-century France. The argument made by their professor, who has spent twenty years researching the subject, is that the cause of declining crop yields between 1742 and 1798 had less to do with bad harvests than with the relatively low price of agricultural land, which encouraged landlords to invest their money in trade rather than farming.

On the floor below, in the classics department, fifteen students are comparing the use of natural imagery in the works of the Roman poets Horace and Petronius. The professor is pointing out that while Horace identifies nature with lawlessness and decay, Petronius, in many ways the more pessimistic of the two poets, reveres it for precisely the opposite qualities. Perhaps because the air ventilation system has broken down and the windows have jammed shut, the atmosphere is a little sluggish. Few students seem to be following the argument with the intent the professor might have hoped for when he was awarded his PhD in Oxford twenty years ago (‘Patterns of Meta-narrative in Euripides’ Ion’).

(illustration credit 4.2)

The application of the university’s academics to their tasks is intense and moving. And yet it is hard to see how the content of their courses and the direction of their examination questions bear any significant relationship to Arnold’s and Mill’s ideals. Whatever rhetoric may be rehearsed in its prospectuses, the modern university appears to have precious little interest in teaching its students any emotional or ethical life skills, much less how to love their neighbours and leave the world happier than they found it.

The prerequisites for a BA in philosophy, for example, are limited to a familiarity with the central topics of metaphysics (substance, individuation, universals) and the completion of a thesis on concepts of intentionality in Quine, Frege or Putnam. An equivalent degree in English literature will be awarded to those who can successfully tackle The Waste Land on allegorical and anagogic levels and trace the influence of Seneca’s dramatic theories on the development of Jacobean theatre.

Graduation speeches stereotypically identify liberal education with the acquisition of wisdom and self-knowledge, but these goals have little bearing on the day-to-day methods of departmental instruction and examination. To judge by what they do rather than what they airily declaim, universities are in the business of turning out a majority of tightly focused professionals (lawyers, physicians, engineers) and a minority of culturally well-informed but ethically confused arts graduates aptly panicked about how they might remuneratively occupy the rest of their lives.

We have implicitly charged our higher-education system with a dual and possibly contradictory mission: to teach us how to make a living and to teach us how to live. And we have left the second of these two aims recklessly vague and unattended.

3.

Who cares? Why should we be worrying about the shortcomings of university education in a book ostensibly concerned with religion?

The reasons start to become clear when we consider the relationship between the decline in the teaching of scripture and the rise in the teaching of culture. When religious belief began to fracture in Europe in the early nineteenth century, anguished questions were raised about how, in the absence of a Christian framework, people would manage to find meaning, understand themselves, behave in a moral fashion, forgive their fellow humans and confront their own mortality. And in answer, it was proposed by an influential faction that cultural works might henceforth be consulted in place of the biblical texts. Culture could replace scripture.

The hope was that culture might be no less effective than religion (which was understood to mean Christianity) in its ability to guide, humanize and console. Histories, paintings, philosophical ideas and fictional narratives could all be mined to yield lessons not far removed in their ethical tenor and emotional impact from those taught by the Bible. One would be able to have meaning unburdened by superstition. The maxims of Marcus Aurelius, the poetry of Boccaccio, the operas of Wagner and the paintings of Turner could be secular society’s new sacraments.

How to live was not on the curriculum. Graduation ceremony, Oxford University. (illustration credit 4.3)

On the basis of such notions, whole subject areas which had never before been included in formal education began to enter the curricula of universities in Europe and the United States. Literature, previously dismissed as being worthy of study only by adolescent girls and convalescents, was recognized as a serious subject fit for analysis within Western universities during the second half of the nineteenth century. The newfound prestige of novels and poems was based on the realization that these forms, much like the Gospels, could deliver complex moral messages embedded within emotionally charged narratives, and thereby prompt affective identification and self-examination. In his inaugural lecture at Oxford University in 1922, George Gordon, Merton Professor of Literature, emphasized the scale of the task that had fallen to his field: ‘England is sick, and … English literature must save it. The Churches (as I understand) having failed, and social remedies being slow, English literature now has a triple function: still, I suppose, to delight and instruct us, but also, and above all, to save our souls and heal the State.’

4.

Claims that culture could stand in for scripture — that Middlemarch could take up the responsibilities previously handled by the Psalms, or the essays of Schopenhauer satisfy needs once catered for by St Augustine’s City of God — still have a way of sounding eccentric or insane in their combination of impiety and ambition.

Nevertheless, perhaps the proposition is not so much absurd as it is unfamiliar. The very qualities that the religious locate in their holy texts can often just as well be discovered in works of culture. Novels and historical narratives can adeptly impart moral instruction and edification. Great paintings do make suggestions about our requirements for happiness. Philosophy can usefully address our anxieties and offer consolations. Literature can change our lives. Equivalents to the ethical lessons of religion do lie scattered across the cultural canon.

Why, then, does the notion of replacing religion with culture, of living according to the lessons of literature and art as believers will according to the lessons of faith, continue to sound so peculiar to us? Why are atheists not able to draw on culture with the same spontaneity and rigour which the religious apply to their holy texts?

This acknowledgement of our inhibitions brings us back to the influence of that foremost upholder and propagator of culture in the modern world, the university. The methodologies which universities today employ in disseminating culture are fundamentally at odds with the intense, neo-religious ambitions once harboured by lapsed or sceptical Christians such as Arnold and Mill. While universities have achieved unparalleled expertise in imparting factual information about culture, they remain wholly uninterested in training students to use it as a repertoire of wisdom — this latter term referring to a kind of knowledge concerned with things which are not only true but also inwardly beneficial, a knowledge which can prove of solace to us when confronted by the infinite challenges of existence, from a tyrannical employer to a fatal lesion on our liver.

A student of medieval literature, Oxford University. (illustration credit 4.4)

We are by no means lacking in material which we might call into service to replace the holy texts; we are simply treating that material in the wrong way. We are unwilling to consider secular culture religiously enough, in other words, as a source of guidance. So opposed have many atheists been to the content of religious belief that they have omitted to appreciate its inspiring and still valid overall object: to provide us with well-structured advice on how to lead our lives.

5.

The differences between secular and religious approaches to education boil down to the question of what learning should be for.

It is a question which tends to vex those in charge of teaching culture in secular institutions. Enquiries as to why, exactly, people should bother to study history or literature usually strike them as impertinent and argumentative and are often left unanswered. Academics in the humanities appreciate that their opposite numbers in the technical and scientific departments can without trouble justify their work in utilitarian terms to impatient government officials and donors (in the unlikely event that anyone should idly wonder what the purpose of rocket science or public health might be). But fearing that they cannot compete effectively against these rivals, the denizens of the humanities prefer to take refuge in ambiguity and silence, having carefully calculated that they retain just enough prestige to get away with leaving the reasons for their existence somewhat murky.

When confronted by those who demand of culture that it should be relevant and useful, that it should offer up advice on how to choose a career or survive the end of a marriage, how to contain sexual impulses or cope with the news of a medical death sentence, the guardians of culture become disdainful. Their ideal audiences are students who are uninclined to drama and self-involvement, who are mature, independent, temperamentally able to live with questions rather than answers and ready to put aside their own needs for the sake of years of disinterested study of agricultural yields in eighteenth-century Normandy or the presence of the infinite in Kant’s noumenal realm.

6.

Christianity meanwhile looks at the purpose of education from another angle, because it has an entirely different concept of human nature. It has no patience with theories that dwell on our independence or our maturity. It instead believes us to be at heart desperate, fragile, vulnerable, sinful creatures, a good deal less wise than we are knowledgeable, always on the verge of anxiety, tortured by our relationships, terrified of death — and most of all in need of God.

What sort of education might benefit such forlorn wretches? While the capacity for abstract thought is considered by Christianity to be in no way dishonourable, and indeed even a potential sign of divine grace, it is held to be of secondary importance to a more practical ability to bring consoling and nurturing ideas to bear on our disturbed and irresolute selves.

We are familiar enough with the major categories of the humanities as they are taught in secular universities — history and anthropology, literature and philosophy — as well as with the sorts of examination questions they produce: Who were the Carolingians? Where did phenomenology originate? What did Emerson want? We know too that this scheme leaves the emotional aspects of our characters to develop spontaneously, or at the very least in private, perhaps when we are with our families or out on solitary walks in the countryside.

In contrast, Christianity concerns itself from the outset with the inner confused side of us, declaring that we are none of us born knowing how to live; we are by nature fragile and capricious, unempathetic and beset by fantasies of omnipotence, worlds away from being able to command even a modicum of the good sense and calm that secular education takes as the starting point for its own pedagogy.

Christianity is focused on helping a part of us that secular language struggles even to name, which is not precisely intelligence or emotion, not character or personality, but another, even more abstract entity loosely connected with all of those and yet differentiated from them by an additional ethical and transcendent dimension — and to which we may as well refer, following Christian terminology, as the soul. It has been the essential task of the Christian pedagogic machine to nurture, reassure, comfort and guide our souls.

Throughout its history, Christianity indulged in lengthy debates as to the nature of the soul, speculating on what it might look like, where it might be located and how it might best be educated. In its origins, the soul was thought by theologians to resemble a miniature baby inserted by God into an infant’s mouth at the moment of his or her birth.

The baby inside us that we must educate. Receiving one’s soul: illumination from an early fifteenth-century Bible. (illustration credit 4.5)

At the other end of the individual’s life, at the moment of death, the soul-baby would then be expelled again through his or her mouth. The trajectory it was to follow would be more ambiguous this time: it would be either taken up by God or snatched away by the Devil, depending on how well or badly its owner had tended to it over the years. A good soul was one that had managed to find appropriate answers to the great questions and tensions of existence, a soul marked by such godly virtues as faith, hope, charity and love.

Differ though we might with Christianity’s view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one — that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.

By its own standards, Christianity therefore has no choice but to tilt its educational emphasis towards explicit questions: How can we manage to live together? How do we tolerate others’ faults? How can we accept our own limitations and assuage our anger? A degree of urgent didacticism is a requirement rather than an insult. The difference between Christian and secular education reveals itself with particular clarity in their respective characteristic modes of instruction: secular education delivers lectures, Christianity sermons. Expressed in terms of intent, we might say that one is concerned with imparting information, the other with changing our lives. Sermons by their very nature assume that their audiences are in important ways lost. The titles alone of the sermons by one of the most famous preachers of eighteenth-century England, John Wesley, show Christianity seeking to dispense practical advice about a range of the soul’s ordinary challenges: ‘On Being Kind’, ‘On Staying Obedient to Parents’, ‘On Visiting the Sick’, ‘On Caution Against Bigotry’. Unlikely though it seems that Wesley’s sermons could ever seduce atheists through their content, they nevertheless succeed, like any number of Christian texts, in categorizing knowledge under useful headings.

An illumination from an early-fifteenth-century Book of Hours, showing a soul which has recently emerged from a deceased man and is being fought over by the Devil and St Michael. (illustration credit 4.6)

While it was at first hoped by Arnold, Mill and others that universities could deliver secular sermons that would tell us how to avoid bigotry and find helpful things to say when visiting ill people, these centres of learning have never offered the kind of guidance that churches have focused on, from a belief that academia should refrain from making any associations between cultural works and individual sorrows. It would be a shocking affront to university etiquette to ask what Tess of the d’Urbervilles might usefully teach us about love, or to suggest that the novels of Henry James might be read with an eye to discovering parables about staying honest in a slippery mercantile world.

Yet a search for parables is precisely what lies at the heart of the Christian approach to texts. Wesley himself was a profoundly scholarly man in ways that the modern university would honour. He had an intimate textual knowledge of Leviticus and Matthew, Corinthians and Luke, but he quoted verses from these only when they could be integrated into a parabolic structure and used to leaven the hardships of his listeners. Like all Christian sermonizers, he looked to culture principally as a tool, asking of any biblical passage what general rules of conduct it could exemplify and promote.

Teaching wisdom rather than knowledge: John Wesley, a sermon outdoors in York, 1746. (illustration credit 4.7)

In the secular sphere, we may well be reading the right books, but we too often fail to ask direct questions of them, declining to advance sufficiently vulgar, neo-religious enquiries because we are embarrassed to admit to the true nature of our inner needs. We are fatefully in love with ambiguity, uncritical of the Modernist doctrine that great art should have no moral content or desire to change its audience. Our resistance to a parabolic methodology stems from a confused distaste for utility, didacticism and simplicity, and from an unquestioned assumption that anything a child could understand must of necessity be infantile in nature.

Yet Christianity holds that, despite outward appearances, important parts of us retain the elemental structures of earliest childhood. Just like children, therefore, we need assistance. Knowledge must be fed to us slowly and carefully, like food cut into manageable bites. Any more than a few lessons in a day will exhaust us unduly. Twelve lines of Deuteronomy may be enough, for instance, along with a few explanatory notes which point out in plain language what there is for us to notice and to feel therein.

The techniques that the academy so fears — the emphasis on the connection between abstract ideas and our own lives, the lucid interpretation of texts, the preference for extracts over wholes — have always been the methods of religions, which had to wrestle, centuries before the invention of television, with the challenge of how to render ideas vivid and pertinent to impatient and distracted audiences. They have realized all along that the greatest danger they faced was not the oversimplification of concepts but the erosion of interest and support through incomprehension and apathy. They recognized that clarity preserves rather than undermines ideas, for it creates a base upon which the intellectual labour of an elite can subsequently rest. Christianity was confident that its precepts were robust enough to be understood at a variety of levels, that they could be presented in the form of crude woodcuts to the yeomen of the parish church or discussed in Latin by theologians at the University of Bologna, and that each iteration would endorse and reinforce the others.

In the preface to a volume of his collected sermons, John Wesley explained and defended his adherence to simplicity: ‘I design plain truth for plain people: therefore … I abstain from all nice and philosophical speculations; from all perplexed and intricate reasonings; and, as far as possible, from even the show of learning. My design is … to forget all that ever I have read in my life.’

A handful of brave secular writers have been able to express themselves with a similarly inspiring openness, among the most notable being Donald Winnicott in the field of psychoanalysis and Ralph Waldo Emerson in literature. But these characters have been regrettably few in number, and most have also drawn upon a religious background to mould and buttress their sensibilities (Winnicott began as a Methodist, Emerson as a Transcendentalist).

The greatest Christian preachers have been vulgar in the very best sense. While not surrendering any of their claims to complexity or insight, they have wished to help those who came to hear them.

7.

By contrast, we have constructed an intellectual world whose most celebrated institutions rarely consent to ask, let alone answer, the most serious questions of the soul. To address the incoherencies of the situation, we might begin to overhaul our universities by doing away with fields like history and literature, ultimately superficial categories which, even if they cover valuable material, do not in themselves track the themes that most torment and attract our souls.

The redesigned universities of the future would draw upon the same rich catalogue of culture treated by their traditional counterparts, likewise promoting the study of novels, histories, plays and paintings, but they would teach this material with a view to illuminating students’ lives rather than merely prodding at academic goals. Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary would thus be assigned in a course on understanding the tensions of marriage instead of in one focused on narrative trends in nineteenth-century fiction, just as the recommendations of Epicurus and Seneca would appear in the syllabus for a course about dying rather than in a survey of Hellenistic philosophy.

Departments would be required to confront the problematic areas of our lives head-on. Notions of assistance and transformation which presently hover ghost-like over speeches at graduation ceremonies would be given form and explored as openly in lay institutions as they are in churches. There would be classes in, among other topics, being alone, reconsidering work, improving relationships with children, reconnecting with nature and facing illness. A university alive to the true responsibilities of cultural artefacts within a secular age would establish a Department for Relationships, an Institute of Dying and a Centre for Self-Knowledge.

In this way, as Arnold and Mill would have wished, secular education would start to outgrow the fears it associates with relevance and redesign its curricula to engage directly with our most pressing personal and ethical dilemmas.

Few would fall asleep. (illustration credit 4.8)

ii. How We Are Taught

1.

Rearranging university education according to the insights gained from religion would entail adjusting not only the curriculum but also, just as crucially, the way it is taught.

In its methods, Christianity has from its beginnings been guided by a simple yet essential observation that has nevertheless never made any impression upon those in charge of secular education: how very easily we forget things.

Its theologians have known that our soul suffers from what ancient Greek philosophers termed akrasia, a perplexing tendency to know what we should do combined with a persistent reluctance actually to do it, whether through weakness of will or absent-mindedness. We all possess wisdom that we lack the strength properly to enact in our lives. Christianity pictures the mind as a sluggish and fickle organ, easy enough to impress but forever inclined to change its focus and cast its commitments aside. Consequently, the religion proposes that the central issue for education is not so much how to counteract ignorance — as secular educators imply — as how we can combat our reluctance to act upon ideas which we have already fully understood at a theoretical level. It follows the Greek sophists in insisting that all lessons should appeal to both reason (logos) and emotion (pathos), as well as endorsing Cicero’s advice that public speakers should have a threefold ability to prove (probare), delight (delectare) and persuade (flectere). There is no justification for delivering world-shaking ideas in a mumble.

2.

However, defenders of secular university education have seldom worried about akrasia. They implicitly maintain that people will be properly affected by concepts even when they hear about them only once or twice, at the age of twenty, before a fifty-year career in finance or market research, via a lecturer standing in a bare room speaking in a monotone. According to this view, ideas may fall out of the mind in much the same random order as the contents of an upturned handbag, or may be expressed with all the graceless banality of an instruction manual, without threatening the overall purpose of intellectual endeavour. Ever since Plato attacked the Greek sophists for being more concerned with speaking well than thinking honestly, Western intellectuals have been intransigently suspicious of eloquence, whether spoken or written, believing that the fluent pedagogue could unfairly disguise unacceptable or barren notions with honeyed words. The way an idea is imparted has been deemed to be of little importance next to the quality of the idea itself. The modern university has thus placed no premium on a talent for oratory, priding itself on its interest in the truth rather than in techniques to ensure its successful and enduring conveyance.

It seems beyond imagining that any contemporary university lecturer would, upon his death, have his body strapped to a table, his neck cut open and his larynx, tongue and lower jaw removed, to be mounted in a golden case encrusted with jewels and displayed in a niche at the centre of a shrine dedicated to the memory of his oratorical gifts. Yet this was precisely the fate of Anthony of Padua, the thirteenth-century Franciscan friar who acceded to sainthood by virtue of his exceptional talent and stamina for public speaking, and whose vocal apparatus, on view in the basilica of his hometown, still draws admiring pilgrims from all corners of Christendom. According to holy legend, Anthony delivered 10,000 sermons over his lifetime and was able to melt the hearts of the most determined sinners. It was even said that one day in Rimini, standing on the seashore, he began to declaim to no one in particular and soon found himself surrounded by an audience of curious and evidently appreciative fish.

This rarely happens to our university lecturers: the enshrined lower jaw of St Anthony of Padua: reliquary, basilica of St Anthony, Padua, c. 1350. (illustration credit 4.9)

3.

St Anthony was but one exemplar in a long and self-conscious tradition of Christian oratory. The preaching of John Donne, the Jacobean poet and dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, was comparably persuasive, treating complex ideas with an impression of effortless lucidity. Forestalling the possibility of boredom during his sermons, Donne would pause every few paragraphs to sum up his thoughts in phrases designed to engrave themselves on his listeners’ skittish minds (‘Age is a sicknesse, and youth is an ambush’). Like all compelling aphorists, he had a keen command of binary oppositions (‘If you take away due fear, you take away true love’), in his case married to a lyrical sensibility which enabled him to soar along contrails of rare adjectives before bringing his congregation up short with a maxim of homespun simplicity (‘Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee’). He situated himself vis-à-vis his audience without any hint of schoolmasterly pedantry. They could feel the truth of his ideas all the more intensely for it being delivered by someone who appeared to be appealingly human and flawed (‘I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in, and invite God, and his Angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his Angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door’).

St Anthony preaching to carp: sixteenth-century illuminated manuscript. (illustration credit 4.10)

More recently, the Christian oratorical tradition has been further developed by African-American preachers, particularly those of the Pentecostal and Baptist denominations. In churches across the United States, a Sunday sermon is not an occasion to sit with one eye trained on the clock while, from a lectern in the apse, a cleric impassively dissects the story of the Good Samaritan. Instead, believers are expected to open their hearts, clasp the hands of their neighbours, erupt into shouts of ‘All right now’ and ‘Amen, preacher’, let the Holy Spirit enter their souls and finally collapse in paroxysms of ecstatic wailing. Up on the stage, the preacher stokes the fires of his congregation’s enthusiasm through call-and-response, asking repeatedly, in a mesmerizing blend of vernacular expression and the vocabulary of the King James Bible, ‘Will you say Amen? I say will you say Amen?’

However powerful any proposition may be, it becomes so much more so in front of a crowd of 500 people who exclaim in unison after every point:

‘… Thank you, Jesus.’

‘… Thank you, Saviour.’

‘… Thank you, Christ.’

‘… Thank you, Lord.’

Could a lecture on Walt Whitman be as moving? (illustration credit 4.11)

There is little chance of resisting a theological argument which flows like this one, from the stage of the New Vision Baptist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee:

‘None of us today is in jail.’

(‘Amen, All right now, Amen, Preacher,’ say the members of the congregation.)

‘Lord have mercy.’

(‘Amen.’)

‘So, brothers, sisters, we should never be in prison in our minds.’

(‘Amen, Preacher.’)

‘Do you hear me, my brothers and sisters?’

(‘Amen, amen, amen!’)

The contrast with the typical lecture in the humanities could hardly be more damning. And unnecessary. What purpose can possibly be served by the academy’s primness? How much more expansive the scope of meaning in Montaignes essays would seem if a 100-strong and transported chorus were to voice its approval after every sentence. How much longer might Rousseau’s philosophical truths linger in our consciousness if they were structured around rhythmical verses of call-and-response. Secular education will never succeed in reaching its potential until humanities lecturers are sent to be trained by African-American Pentecostal preachers. Only then will our timid pedagogues be able to shake off their inhibitions during lectures on Keats or Adam Smith and, unconstrained by false notions of propriety, call out to their comatose audiences, ‘Do you hear me? I say do you hear me?’ And only then will their now-tearful students fall to their knees, ready to let the spirit of some of the world’s most important ideas enter and transform them.

4.

Aside from needing to be delivered eloquently, ideas also have to be repeated to us constantly. Three or five or ten times a day, we must be forcibly reminded of truths that we love but otherwise will not be able to hold on to. What we read at nine in the morning we will have forgotten by lunchtime and will need to reread by dusk. Our inner lives must be lent a structure and our best thoughts reinforced to counter the continuous pull of distraction and disintegration.

Religions have been wise enough to establish elaborate calendars and schedules which lay claim to the lengths as well as the depths of their followers’ lives, letting no month, day or hour escape without administration of a precisely calibrated dose of ideas. In the detailed way in which they tell the faithful what to read, think, sing and do at almost every moment, religious agendas seem at once sublimely obsessive and calmingly thorough. The Book of Common Prayer, for instance, decrees that its subscribers should always gather at six-thirty in the evening on the twenty-sixth Sunday after Trinity, as the candlelight throws shadows against the chapel walls, to listen to a reading from the second section of the deuterocanonical Book of Baruch, just as on 25 January they must always think of the Conversion of St Paul, and on the morning of 2 July reflect on the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary and imbibe the moral lessons of Job 3. Schedules are more exacting still for Catholics, whose days are punctuated by no fewer than seven occasions for prayer. Every evening at ten they must, for example, scan their consciences, read a Psalm, declare In manus tuas, Domine (‘Into your hands, Lord’), sing the Nunc dimittis from the second chapter of the Gospel of St Luke and conclude with a hymn to the mother of Jesus (‘Virgin now and always, take pity on us sinners’).

How free secular society leaves us by contrast. It expects that we will spontaneously find our way to the ideas that matter to us and gives us weekends off for consumption and recreation. Like science, it privileges discovery. It associates repetition with punitive shortage, presenting us with an incessant stream of new information — and therefore it prompts us to forget everything.

For example, we are enticed to go to the cinema to see a newly released film, which ends up moving us to an exquisite pitch of sensitivity, sorrow and excitement. We leave the theatre vowing to reconsider our entire existence in light of the values shown on screen, and to purge ourselves of our decadence and haste. And yet by the following evening, after a day of meetings and aggravations, our cinematic experience is well on its way towards obliteration, just like so much else which once impressed us but which we soon enough came to discard: the majesty of the ruins of Ephesus, the view from Mount Sinai, the poetry recital in Edinburgh, the feelings we had after putting down Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. In the end, all modern artists share something of the bathetic condition of chefs, for whereas their works may not themselves erode, the responses of their audiences will. We honour the power of culture but rarely admit with what scandalous ease we forget its individual monuments. Three months after we finish reading a masterpiece, we may struggle to remember a single scene or phrase from it.

We won’t remember what we don’t reread: a Catholic schedule of texts. (illustration credit 4.12)

Our favourite secular books do not alert us to how inadequate a one-off linear reading of them will prove. They do not identify the particular days of the year on which we ought to reconsider them, as the holy books do — in the latter case with 200 others around us and an organ playing in the background. There is arguably as much wisdom to be found in the stories of Anton Chekhov as in the Gospels, but collections of the former are not bound with calendars reminding readers to schedule a regular review of their insights. We would face grave accusations of eccentricity if we attempted to construct liturgies from the works of secular authors. At best, we haphazardly underline a few of the sentences that we most admire in them and which we may once in a while chance upon in an idle moment waiting for a taxi.

The followers of the faiths feel no such inhibitions. For Jews, the ritual of reading aloud the Five Books of Moses, two sections at a time, on a Monday and a Thursday, has lain at the heart of their religion since the end of the Babylonian captivity in 537 BC. On the twenty-second day of the Hebrew month of Tishrei, the holiday of Simchat Torah marks the end of one read-through of the Books and the start of the next, with the final section of Deuteronomy and the first of Genesis being recited back to back. The congregant who has been assigned to read Deuteronomy 34:1–12 is quaintly designated the Chatan Torah (‘bridegroom of the Torah’), while the one in charge of reading Genesis 1 is referred to as the Chatan Bereshit (‘bridegroom of Genesis’). We secular types may think we love books, but how lacklustre our attachment must seem compared with that of the two bridegrooms who make seven circuits around the synagogue, chanting out their joy and beseeching God, ‘Hoshiah na’ (‘Deliver us’) while the other members of the congregation wave flags, kiss one another and shower sweets on all the children present. How regrettable that when we turn the final page of Marcel Proust’s Time Regained, our own society would consider us peculiar indeed if we went on to compete for the honour of being the bridegroom of Swann’s Way (Chatan Bereshit shel betzad shel Swann).

5.

Secular life is not, of course, unacquainted with calendars and schedules. We know them well in relation to work, and accept the virtues of reminders of lunch meetings, cash-flow projections and tax deadlines. We somehow feel, however, that it would be a violation of our spontaneity to be presented with rotas for rereading Walt Whitman or Marcus Aurelius. Moved though we may be by Leaves of Grass or the Meditations, we deny that there might be any need, if we wish these books to have a genuine influence on our lives, of revisiting them daily. We are more alarmed by the potentially asphyxiating effects of being compelled to have structured encounters with ideas than by the notion that we might otherwise be in danger of forgetting them altogether.

But forget them we do. The modern world is dense with stimuli, of which none is more insistent than that torrent which we capture with the term ‘news’. This entity occupies in the secular sphere much the same position of authority that the liturgical calendar has in the religious one, its main dispatches tracking the canonical hours with uncanny precision: matins have here been transubstantiated into the breakfast bulletin, and vespers into the evening report.

The prestige of the news is founded on the unstated assumption that our lives are forever poised on the verge of critical transformation thanks to the two driving forces of modern history: politics and technology. The earth must therefore be latticed with fibre-optic cables, the waiting rooms of its airports filled with monitors and the public squares of cities ribboned with the chase of stock prices.

For religions, by contrast, there is seldom any need to alter insights or harvest them incrementally through news bulletins. The great stable truths can be written down on vellum or carved into stone rather than swilling malleably across handheld screens. For 1.6 billion Buddhists, there has been no news of world-altering significance since 483 BC. For their Christian counterparts, the critical events of history came to a close around Easter Sunday in AD 30, while for the Jews the line was drawn a little after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Roman general Titus in AD 70.

Even if we do not concur with the specific messages that religions schedule for us, we can still concede that we have paid a price for our promiscuous involvement with novelty. We occasionally sense the nature of our loss at the end of an evening, as we finally silence the television after watching a report on the opening of a new railway or the tetchy conclusion to a debate over immigration and realize that — in attempting to follow the narrative of man’s ambitious progress towards a state of technological and political perfection — we have sacrificed an opportunity to remind ourselves of quieter truths which we know about in theory and forget to live by in practice.

6.

Our peculiar approach to culture spills over from education into associated fields. Comparably suspect assumptions are rife, for example, in the manufacture and sale of books.

Here too we are presented with infinitely more material than we can ever assimilate and we struggle to hold on to what matters most to us. A moderately industrious undergraduate pursuing a degree in the humanities at the beginning of the twenty-first century might run through 800 books before graduation day; by comparison, a wealthy English family in 1250 would have counted itself fortunate to have three books in its possession, this modest library consisting of a Bible, a collection of prayers and a compendium of lives of the saints — these nevertheless costing as much as a cottage. If we lament our book-swamped age, it is because we sense that it is not by reading more, but by deepening and refreshing our understanding of a few volumes that we best develop our intelligence and our sensitivity. We feel guilty for all that we have not yet read, but overlook how much better read we already are than Augustine or Dante, thereby ignoring that our problem lies squarely with our manner of absorption rather than with the extent of our consumption.

We are often urged to celebrate not only that there are so many books to hand, but also that they are so inexpensive. Yet neither of these circumstances should necessarily be deemed unambiguous advantages. The costly and painstaking craftsmanship behind a pre-Gutenberg Bible — revealed in the illuminated flowers in the margins, the naive drawings of Jonah and the whale and the brilliant blue skies dotted with exotic birds above the Virgin — was the product of a society which accepted containment as the basis for immersion, and which wished to elevate individual books into objects of extraordinary beauty so as to emphasize their spiritual and moral significance.

Though technology has rendered it more or less absurd to feel gratitude over owning a book, there remain psychological advantages in rarity. We can revere the care that goes into making a Jewish Sefer Torah, the sacred scroll of the Pentateuch, a copy of which will take a single scribe a year and a half to write out by hand, on a parchment made from the hide of a ceremonially slaughtered goat which has been soaked for nine days in a rabbinically prepared mixture of apple juice, saltwater and gall nuts. We should be prepared to swap a few of our swiftly disintegrating paperbacks for volumes that would proclaim, through the weight and heft of their materials, the grace of their typography and the beauty of their illustrations, our desire for their contents to assume a permanent place in our hearts.

A book which cost as much as a house: an illuminated vellum page from a late-fifteenth-century prayer book, depicting the Adoration of the Magi. (illustration credit 4.13)

iii. Spiritual Exercises

1.

Alongside setting alternative curricula for universities and emphasizing the need to rehearse and digest knowledge, religions have also been radical in taking education out of the classroom and combining it with other activities, encouraging their followers to learn through all of their senses, not only by listening and reading but also, and more broadly, by doing: eating, drinking, bathing, walking and singing.

Zen Buddhism, for instance, proposes ideas about the importance of friendship, the inevitability of frustration and the imperfection of human endeavours. But it does not simply lecture its adherents about these tenets; it helps them more directly to apprehend their truth through activities such as flower arranging, calligraphy, meditation, walking, gravel rak — ing and, most famously, tea drinking.

Because the last of these is at once such a common practice in the West and yet so devoid of spiritual significance, it seems particularly strange as well as delightful that Zen Buddhism should have anointed the tea ceremony as one of its most significant pedagogic moments, as important to Buddhists as the Mass is to Catholics. During chanoyu, as the ceremony is known, some of the same feelings that hover faintly over a typical English tea are refined, amplified and symbolically connected to Buddhist doctrine. Every aspect of the ritual has meaning, beginning with the cups, whose misshapen form reflects Zen’s affection for all that is raw and unpretentious. The slow way in which the drink is brewed by the tea master allows the demands of the ego to go into abeyance, the simple decorations of the tea hut are meant to draw thoughts away from concerns with status, while the steaming scented tea should help one to feel the truths lurking behind the Chinese characters written on scrolls on the walls denoting key Buddhist virtues like ‘harmony’, ‘purity’ and ‘tranquillity’.

The point of the tea ceremony is not to teach a new philosophy but to make an existing one more vivid through an activity which carries subtle sympathies with it; it is a mechanism for bringing to life ideas about which participants already have a good intellectual grasp and yet continue to need encouragement to abide by.

To take a comparable example from another faith, Jewish texts make repeated mention of the importance of atonement and the possibilities for renewal through the admission of sin. But within the religion, such ideas are not merely imparted through books, they are made vibrant through a bodily experience: a ritualized version of having a bath. Since the Babylonian exile, Judaism has advised its communities to construct mikvot — sacred baths each containing exactly 575 litres of clean spring water — in which Jews are to immerse themselves after confessing to spiritually doubtful acts, in order to recover their purity and their connection to God. The Torah recommends a full immersion in a mikveh every Friday afternoon, before the New Year and following every seminal emission.

The institution of the mikveh relies on a sense of renewal which secular bathers already know a little about, but lends it greater depth, structure and solemnity. An atheist may, of course, also feel clean after taking a bath and dirty without one, but the mikveh ritual, associating outer hygiene with the recovery of a particular kind of inner purity, like so many other symbolic practices promoted by religions, manages to use a physical activity to support a spiritual lesson.

A lesson about the meaning of life threaded into a tea party. (illustration credit 4.14)

2.

Religions understand the value of training our minds with a rigour that we are accustomed to applying only to the training of our bodies. They present us with an array of spiritual exercises designed to strengthen our inclination towards virtuous thoughts and patterns of behaviour: they sit us down in unfamiliar spaces, adjust our posture, regulate what we eat, give us scripts detailing what we should say to one another and minutely monitor the thoughts that cross our consciousness. They do all this not in order to deny us freedom but to quell our anxieties and flex our moral capacities.

This double insight — that we should train our minds just as we train our bodies, and that we should do so partly through those bodies — has led to the founding, by all the major faiths, of religious retreats where adherents may for a limited time abscond from their ordinary lives and find inner restoration through spiritual exercise.

The secular world offers no true parallels. Our closest equivalents are country hotels and spas, though the comparison serves only to reveal our shallowness. The brochures for such establishments tend to promise us opportunities to rediscover what is most essential to us, they show us images of couples in plush dressing gowns, they vaunt the quality of their mattresses and toiletries or boast of their twenty-four-hour provision of room service. But the emphasis is always on physical satiation and mental diversion rather than on any real fulfilment of the needs of our souls. These places have no way of helping us when the incompatibilities in our relationships reach a new nadir, when reading the Sunday newspapers provokes panic about our careers or when we wake up in terror just before dawn, paralysed by the thought of how short a span of life remains to us. Otherwise solicitous concierges, brimful of ideas about where we might partake of horse riding or mini-golf, will fall suddenly silent when questioned about strategies for coping with guilt, wayward longings or self-loathing.

Using a bath to support an idea: a Jewish mikveh in Willesden, north-west London. (illustration credit 4.15)

Religious retreats are, fortunately, somewhat more rounded in their attentions. St Bernard, the founder of the first Cistercian monasteries (organizations which in his day functioned as both retreats for the laity and permanent residences for monks), suggested that all human beings were divided into three parts, corpus (body), animus (mind) and spiritus (spirit), each of which must be carefully looked after by any decent hostelry.

In the tradition of St Bernard, Catholic retreats continue even today to provide their guests with comfortable accommodations, extensive libraries and spiritual activities ranging from the ‘examen’ — a thrice-daily survey of the conscience, carried out alone and in silence (usually with a lighted candle and a statuette of Jesus) — to sessions with counsellors who have been specially trained to inject logic and morality into believers’ confused and corrupted thought processes.

Although the specific lessons taught therein may differ markedly, Buddhist retreats embody an equal commitment to the whole self. After hearing of one in the English countryside specializing in seated and walking forms of meditation, I resolved to see for myself what benefits might be derived from a course of spiritual exercises.

At six in the morning one Saturday in June, some 2,573 years after the Buddha was born not far from Kapilavastu, in the Ganges river basin, I sit in a semicircle with twelve other novices in a converted barn in Suffolk. Our teacher, Tony, begins the session by inviting us to understand the human condition as it is viewed through Buddhist eyes. He says that most of the time, without having any choice in the matter, we are dominated by our ego, or, as it is termed in Sanskrit, our ātman. This centre of consciousness is by nature selfish, narcissistic and insatiable, unreconciled to its own mortality and driven to avoid the prospect of death by fantasizing about the redemptive powers of career, status and wealth. It is let loose like a demented dynamo at the moment of our birth and does not incline to rest until we breathe our last. Because the ego is inherently vulnerable, its predominant mood is one of anxiety. It is skittish, jumping from object to object, unable ever to relax its vigilance or engage properly with others. Even under the most auspicious of contexts, it is never far from a relentless, throbbing drumbeat of worry, which conspires to prevent it from sincere involvement with anything outside of itself. And yet the ego also has a touching tendency constantly to trust that its desires are about to be fulfilled. Images of tranquillity and security haunt it: a particular job, social conquest or material acquisition always seems to hold out the promise of an end to craving. In reality, however, each worry will soon enough be replaced by another, and one desire by the next, generating a relentless cycle of what Buddhists call ‘grasping’, or upādāna in Sanskrit.

The Cistercian monastery of Clairvaux, 1708: a resting place for the body, mind and spirit. Each zone of the monastery was assigned a different part of the self to heal. The body was to be looked after by the kitchens and the dormitory, the mind by the library and the spirit by the chapel. (illustration credit 4.16)

Nevertheless, as Tony now explains, this sombre picture of one part of ourselves does not have to define all that we are, because we are endowed too with the rare ability, reinforceable through spiritual exercises, occasionally to set aside the demands of our egos and to enter into a state of what Buddhists call anātman, or egolessness, during which we can take a step back from our passions and think about what our lives might be like if we were not burdened by the additional and painful need to be ourselves.

It is a sign of the Western bias towards the intellect that it comes as a surprise to be told that we should begin the business of setting aside our egos not primarily through logical argument but rather by learning to sit on the ground in a new way.

As Tony specifies, our capacity to reorient our priorities will critically depend on our ability to stand up, shake our limbs loose for a minute and then rearrange our bodies in the Vairocana seven-point meditation posture. For a group of novices this is, inevitably, something of a struggle, since many of our bodies are no longer quite so young, and all of us seem afflicted by the self-consciousness that naturally results from contorting oneself in one’s socks in front of strangers. A certain amount of giggling and even the occasional fart ensue as we strive to imitate Tony’s position, which is reputed to be the same one adopted by the Buddha and his disciples as they meditated under a sacred Bodhi tree in the eastern Indian state of Bihar twenty-odd centuries ago. The instructions are precise: our legs must be crossed, our left hand must rest on top of our right in our lap, our spine should be straight, our shoulders lightly stretched, our head inclined forwards, our gaze directed downwards, our mouth slightly open, the tip of our tongue touching the roof of our mouth, our breathing steady and slow.

(illustration credit 4.17)

To answer our longing for calm, Western consumer society has over the last fifty years refined the concept of sunbathing; Buddhism has taken over a thousand years to perfect the art of meditation. (illustration credit 4.18)

Gradually the group falls into line, and the room grows silent save for the hoot of an owl in a distant field. Tony guides us to focus on the unremarkable yet rarely remarked-upon fact that we are all breathing. In our first steps towards mastering the ānāpānasati (‘mindfulness of breathing’) meditation, we recognize the extraordinary challenge posed by sitting quietly in a room and doing nothing other than existing — we apprehend, in other words, the draconian grip which the priorities and projects of our egos have on us. We take note of our tendencies towards distraction. As we strive to attend only to our breathing, we sense our conscious minds shooting this way and that on their customarily frantic itineraries. We realize how absurdly difficult we find it to take even three breaths without being seized by an anxiety-charged idea, and extrapolate from that how uncommon it must be for us to inhabit any experience without becoming enmeshed in the tendrils of our ātman.

The purpose of our new seating position is to open up a modest distance between our consciousness and our ego. As we feel ourselves breathing, we notice that our physical beings have rhythms which play out without reference to our ego-led desires. The otherness of the body is one aspect of a vast realm of anātman which the ego does not control or understand and to which Buddhism now seeks to introduce us.

(illustration credit 4.19)

Because it is the ego’s habit to try to exploit and use as an instrument all that it encounters, it is unaware of the body except insofar as it is useful to its projects for sensory gratification. It is latently resentful of and appalled by its fragility. It does not want to think of the strange ways of the liver or of the mysterious doings of the pancreas. It orders the body to stay faithful to its tasks, hunched over the desk with back muscles clenched into a state of obedience and anxious expectation. Yet now, suddenly, the ego is being asked to cede control to nothing more distinguished and productive than the act of breathing, that background process of inhalation and exhalation which has been going on largely unnoticed and unappreciated since our birth. Taken aback, it experiences some of the same confusion that a king might feel upon being forced, due to unexpected circumstances, to spend a night on a hard bed in a humble inn.

With all our attention directed towards our breathing instead of the ego’s demands, it starts to give up some of its claims on consciousness and lets in data which it ordinarily filters out. We become aware of things, both internal and external, that have nothing to do with our usual concerns. Our consciousness shifts from a focus on breathing to an awareness first of our limbs, then of the skeleton that supports us and the blood that is continuously moving within us. We become alive to the sensitivity of our own cheeks, the small stirrings of air in the room, the textures of our clothes against our skin.

Later in the morning, we go outside for another spiritual exercise called a walking meditation, pioneered by the Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh. We are instructed to empty our minds and wander the landscape without asking anything more of it than to observe it, freed for the moment of those ego-dominated habits of ours which strip nature of its beauty and give us a misleading and troubling sense of our own importance in the cosmos. Under tutelage, we proceed at a camel’s pace, our consciousness untroubled by any of our ego’s customary ambitions or chidings — in a state as much prized by Buddhism as it is reviled by capitalism, and known in Sanskrit as apranihita, or aimlessness — and thereby become newly attuned to a thousand details of our surroundings. There is a shaft of sunlight filtering through the trees, in which minuscule particles of dust are dancing. There is the sound of running water coming from a nearby stream. A spider is making its way across a branch above us. Buddhist poetry is dominated by records of similar encounters with just such tiny facets of the world, which reach our senses only after our egos have loosened their grip on our faculties.

‘Coming along the mountain path

I find something endearing

about violets’

reads a poem by the Zen poet Bashō. Working our way through the undergrowth, we become disinterested surveyors of our own existence, and hence ever so slightly more patient and compassionate observers of the planet, its people and its small purple flowers.

(illustration credit 4.20)

3.

The specifics of the exercises taught at Buddhist and other retreats are perhaps not as significant as the general point they raise about our need to impose greater discipline on our inner lives.

If the predominant share of our distress is caused by the state of our psyches, it seems perverse that the modern leisure industry should seek always to bring comfort to our bodies without attempting simultaneously to console and tame what the Buddhists so presciently term our ‘monkey minds’. We require effective centres for the restoration of our whole beings; new kinds of retreats devoted to educating, through an array of secularized spiritual exercises, our corporeal as well as psychological selves.

iv. Teaching Wisdom

Ultimately, the purpose of all education is to save us time and spare us errors. It is a mechanism whereby society — whether secular or religious — attempts reliably to inculcate in its members, within a set span of years, what it took the very brightest and most determined of their ancestors centuries of painful and sporadic efforts to work out.

Secular society has proved itself ready enough to accept the logic of this mission in relation to scientific and technical knowledge. It sees nothing to regret in the fact that a university student enrolled today on a physics degree will in a matter of months be able to learn as much as Faraday ever knew, and within a couple of years may be pushing at the outer limits of Einstein’s unified field theory.

Yet this selfsame principle, which seems at once so obvious and so inoffensive in science, tends to be met with extraordinary opposition when applied to wisdom; to insights related to the self-aware and moral stewardship of the soul. Here, remarkably, the defenders of education, who would ridicule the notion that a class of freshly enrolled physics students ought to be left to work out the theory of electromagnetic radiation on their own, will declaim that wisdom is not something that one person can ever teach another.

This prejudice has so subsumed the teaching of culture as to have more or less stamped out the ambitions of Mill and Arnold, as well as the magniloquent hopes of Rilke, who in the last line of his poem ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’ surmised that it was the ultimate wish of all great artists to admonish their audiences, ‘Du musst dein Leben ändern’ (‘You must change your life’).

It is to religions’ credit that they have never sided with those who would argue that wisdom is unteachable. They have dared directly to address the great questions of individual life — What should I work for? How do I love? How can I be good? — in ways that should intrigue atheists even if they find little to agree with in the specific answers provided.

As this chapter has suggested, culture is more than adequately equipped to confront our dilemmas without having to rely on religious dogma. The errors that wreak havoc on our personal and political lives have been supplying subject matter for cultural works since antiquity. There is no shortage of information about folly, greed, lust, envy, pride, sentimentality or snobbishness in the canon; all the clues we need can be found in such oeuvres as those of Freud, Marx, Musil, Andrei Tarkovsky, Kenzaburo Oe, Fernando Pessoa, Poussin or Saul Bellow. The problem is that this treasury has seldom been effectively filleted and skilfully served up to us due to unfounded biases against the use of culture in the service of our griefs.

No existing mainstream secular institution has a declared interest in teaching us the art of living. To draw an analogy from the history of science, the ethical field is at the stage of amateurs tinkering with chemicals in garden sheds rather than that of professionals conducting well-structured experiments in research laboratories. University academics, the obvious candidates for any soul-focused pedagogical task, have distanced themselves from demands for relevance by retreating behind a pose of a priori importance. They have shunned the responsibility of seducing their audiences, they have been fatally frightened of simplicity, they have pretended not to notice how fragile we are and they have been blind to how readily we forget everything, however significant it may be.

Religion is laden with ideas for correctives. Its example proposes a new curriculum: a scheme for arranging knowledge according to the challenges to which it relates rather than the academic area in which it happens to fall; a strategy of reading for a purpose (to become better and saner); an investment in oratory and a set of methods for memorizing and more effectively publishing ideas.

In case some of these educational practices should to certain ears sound too Christian, we should remember that they frequently far preceded the birth of Jesus. The Greeks and Romans had long been interested in how to calibrate knowledge to inner needs: it was they who first founded schools for disseminating wisdom, compared books to medicines and saw value in rhetoric and repetition. We should not let atheism get in the way of appreciating traditions that are part of a shared non-denominational heritage that was historically stamped out by secularists from a misunderstanding of the real identities of those who had once created it.

Religions do not, as modern universities will, limit their teaching to a fixed period of time (a few years of youth), a particular space (a campus) or a single format (the lecture). Recognizing that we are as much sensory as cognitive creatures, they understand that they will need to use all possible resources to sway our minds. Many of their methods, though remote from contemporary notions of education, should nevertheless be considered essential to any plan to render ideas, be they theological or secular, more effective in our porous minds. These techniques deserve to be studied and adopted, so that we stand a chance of making at least one or two fewer mistakes than the previous generation in the time that remains to us.