Religion for Atheists

V

Tenderness

1.

A fifteenth-century chapel in a backstreet of an unnamed northern European town. It is early afternoon on a sombre winter’s day and a middle-aged man shakes down his umbrella and steps inside. The space is warm and dark, lit only by several rows of candles that throw a dance of shadows across the limestone walls. There are comfortable, well-worn pews and, on the floor, prayer cushions, each one embroidered with the words Mater Dolorosa. An elderly woman kneels in the far corner, mumbling to herself with her eyes closed.

The man is exhausted. His joints ache. He feels weak, vulnerable and close to tears. No single event has brought him to this point, just a run of minor humiliations that have cumulatively contributed to an overwhelming sense of mediocrity, superfluousness and self-hatred. His career, once so promising, has for a long time now been in descent. He knows how unimpressive he must appear to others, how keen they are to move on from him in social gatherings and just how many of his proposals and letters have gone unanswered. He no longer has the confidence to push himself forward. He is appalled by the seams of impatience and vanity in his character which have led him to this professional impasse. He is stricken by feelings of remorse, foreboding and loneliness. He knows, however, that he couldn’t possibly bring these worries home with him. The boys need to believe in his strength. His harried wife has too much on her plate already — and he has learned from experience how badly things turn out when he presents himself to the household in this mood.

He wants to fall asleep and be held. He wants to cry. He wants to be forgiven and reassured. There is music playing through concealed speakers in the chapel, the aria ‘Erbarme dich, mein Gott’ from Bach’s St Matthew Passion. He searches for ideas he can cling to, but nothing seems solid. He is unable to think logically and even making the effort to do so has become more than he can bear.

Having fallen to his knees, he looks up at the painting that hangs above the altar. It shows a tender, sympathetic, gentle young woman with a halo around her head. She gazes back down at him with infinite care — and, without his having to say a word, seems to understand everything.

He remembers the prayers learned so long ago as a child, when he was still thought to be full of potential, when he knew how to make others proud of him, when his parents worried how much he had had to eat and wiped his sticky fingers for him after a meal and when the world and all its opportunities lay before him: ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, Amen.’ He closes his eyes and feels the press of tears against his eyelids. ‘To you I come; before you I stand, sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in your mercy hear me and answer me …’

2.

Although we have located this scene in Europe, it could unfold almost anywhere in the world. Comparable moments of despair are to be witnessed every day in the Chapel of Our Lady of Good Health in Kuala Lumpur and the Shrine of Our Lady of Sorrows in Rhineland, Missouri, in the Grotto of Unyang Dedicated to Our Lady in South Korea and the Nuestra Señora del Espejo in Venezuela. In these sanctuaries the desperate will glance up at the Virgin, light candles, say prayers and speak of their individual griefs to a woman who is not only Redemptoris Mater, mother of the redeemer, but also Mater Ecclesia, mother of the Church in its entirety and so, symbolically, of all its members.

From a robustly rational perspective, Marian devotion seems to exemplify religion at its most infantile and soft-headed. How could any reasonable adult trust in the existence of a woman who lived several thousand years ago (if she ever lived at all), much less draw comfort from a projected belief in her unblemished heart, her selfless sympathy and her limitless patience?

The drift of the question is hard to refute; it is simply the wrong question to raise. The apposite point is not whether the Virgin exists, but what it tells us about human nature that so many Christians over two millennia have felt the need to invent her. Our focus should be on what the Virgin Mary reveals about our emotional requirements — and, in particular, on what becomes of these demands when we lose our faith.

In the broadest sense, the cult of Mary speaks of the extent to which, despite our adult powers of reasoning, our responsibilities and our status, the needs of childhood endure within us. While for long stretches of our lives we can believe in our maturity, we never succeed in insulating ourselves against the kind of catastrophic events that sweep away our ability to reason, our courage and our resourcefulness at putting dramas in perspective and throw us back into a state of primordial helplessness.

‘I understand’: Giovanni Battista Salvi, The Madonna in Sorrow, c. 1650. (illustration credit 5.1)

Prayers to Mary, Vilnius, Lithuania. (illustration credit 5.2)

At such moments we may long to be held and reassured, as we were decades ago by some sympathetic adult, most likely our mother, a person who made us feel physically protected, stroked our hair, looked at us with benevolence and tenderness and perhaps said not very much other than, very quietly, ‘of course’.

Though such longings go largely unmentioned in adult society, it has been the achievement of religions to know how to reanimate and legitimate them. Mary in Christianity, Isis in ancient Egypt, Demeter in Greece, Venus in Rome and Guan Yin in China have all functioned as conduits to recollections of early tenderness. Their statues often stand in darkened, womb-like spaces, their faces are compassionate and supportive, they enable us to sit, talk and cry with them. The similarities between them are too great to be coincidental. We are dealing here with figures that have evolved not out of shared cultural origins but in response to the universal needs of the human psyche.

Chinese Buddhists will visit Guan Yin for the very same reasons that Catholics call on Mary. She too has kind eyes and can suggest alternatives to despising oneself. In temples and outdoor plazas across China, adults allow themselves to be weak in her presence. Her gaze has a habit of making people cry — for the moment one breaks down isn’t so much when things are hard as when one finally encounters kindness and a chance to admit to sorrows one has been harbouring in silence for too long. Like Mary, Guan Yin has a sense of the difficulties involved in trying to lead a remotely adequate adult life.

Guan Yin, Hainan Island, China. (illustration credit 5.3)

3.

By contrast with religion, atheism is prone to seem coldly impatient with our neediness. The longing for comfort which lies at the heart of the Marian cult seems perilously regressive and at odds with the rational engagement with existence on which atheists pride themselves. Mary and her cohorts have been framed as symptoms of urges which adults ought quickly to outgrow.

At its most withering and intellectually pugnacious, atheism has attacked religion for blinding itself to its own motives, for being unwilling to acknowledge that it is, at base, nothing more than a glorified response to childhood longings which have been dressed up, recast in new forms and projected into the heavens.

This charge may well be correct. The problem is that those who level it are themselves often involved in a denial, a denial of the needs of childhood. In their zeal to attack believers whose frailties have led them to embrace the supernatural, atheists may neglect the frailty that is an inevitable feature of all our lives. They may label as childish particular needs which should really be honoured as more generally human, for there is in truth no maturity without an adequate negotiation with the infantile and no such thing as a grown-up who does not regularly yearn to be comforted like a child.

We can be touched and reassured because this is both us and not us: Giovanni Bellini, Madonna and Child, 1480. (illustration credit 5.4)

Christianity describes the capacity to accept dependence as a mark of moral and spiritual health. Only the proud and vainglorious would attempt to deny their weaknesses, while the devout can declare without awkwardness, as a sign of their faith, that they have spent time in tears at the foot of a statue of a giant wooden mother. The cult of Mary recasts vulnerability as a virtue and thus corrects our habitual tendency to believe in a conclusive division between adult and childhood selves. At the same time, Christianity is appropriately delicate in the way it frames our needs. It allows us to partake of the comfort of the maternal without forcing us to face up to our lingering and inescapable desire for an actual mother. It makes no mention of our mother; it simply offers us the imaginative pleasures of being once again young, babied and cared for by a figure who is mater to the world.

4.

If there is a problem with Christianity’s approach, it is that it has been too successful. The need for comfort has come to be overly identified with a need for Mary herself, instead of being seen for what it really is: an eternal appetite which began long before the Gospels, originating at the very moment when the first child was picked up by his or her mother and soothed amid the darkness and cold of the first underground cave.

That there is no sympathetic mother or caring father out there who can make everything all right for us is no reason to deny how strongly we wish that there could be. Religion teaches us to be gentle on ourselves in those times of crisis when, desperate and afraid, we confusedly cry out for help from someone — even though we ostensibly don’t believe in anything, even though our own mother is long dead, our father was unavailable and cruel and we now occupy a responsible and grown-up place in the world.

The example of Catholicism suggests that art and architecture have a role to play at such times, for it is through looking at images of parental faces turned lovingly towards children, usually in the quiet, darkened recesses of chapels, museums and associated places of veneration, that we sense some primordial need in us being answered and a certain balance restored.

It would be useful if our secular artists were occasionally to create works which took parental care as their central theme, and if architects designed spaces, whether in museums or, more ambitiously, in new Temples to Tenderness, where we could contemplate these new works in a twilight ambience.

The Marian cult dares to propose to all atheists, even the most hard-headed, that they too remain vulnerable and pre-rational in their hearts, and might learn to help themselves out of certain darker moods through an accommodation with their eternally artless and immature sides.

In rejecting superstition, we should take care that we aren’t tempted to ignore the less respectable longings which religions have been so successful in identifying and dignified in resolving.

Adult life isn’t possible without moments when, with reason being ineffective, all we can do is regress. A secular Temple to Tenderness, backlit by Mary Cassatt’s 1893 painting The Child’s Bath. (illustration credit 5.5)