Christianity

Conversation 20, Socrates Worldview 15/22

‘Then Yahweh passed before him and called out, “Yahweh, Yahweh, God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in faithful love and constancy …”’ (The New Jerusalem Bible 1985, Exodus 34:6)

‘Good and bad, I defined these terms, quite clear, no doubt, somehow. Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.’ (Bob Dylan, 1964, My Back Pages)

SOCRATES. Now, fellow riders, I think I’ve given you a glimpse of why I don’t find humanism satisfactory.

CRITOBULUS. More than a glimpse, Socrates, but perhaps you could run your reasons by us again.

S. Setting aside the fact that I find humanists insufferably smug when they talk about humanism, I made the case that the basic ethical principles of humanism are matters of personal preference and no more true or fundamental than the principles anyone else might choose to adopt. The simple fact is, Critobulus, I find humanism dry and boring.

C. Your main objection to humanism is that it’s boring?

S. Yes, Critobulus, it lacks what I have called enchantment. It would be the easy way, the broad road, for me to be a humanist. I would be ‘cool’, and eminently rational, rather than deeply unfashionable. I could content myself with being, in my own eyes, a good and tolerant person, reasonably sure of my well-considered ethical judgements. I would have the satisfaction of smugness. But it wouldn’t be enough. It wasn’t enough. Something was missing, something that I felt was the real core of a good life.

ADEIMANTUS. And this ‘real core’ was enchantment? Have you found this enchantment, Socrates?

S. To my surprise I found it in Christianity, as represented by the Catholic Church. The Catholic faith provides sound principles for an ethical life. I find these principles agreeable, so I choose them. But if principles were all I got from the faith, I would be no better off than a humanist. The faith offers so much more – mystery, purpose, belonging, and a sense of being part of something with universal and eternal scope, in a word, enchantment. If he is humble enough to doubt his judgement, your humanist spends his day worrying about whether he has made the right ethical deductions. The Christian doesn’t worry because the ‘yoke is easy and the burden light’. When the reasoning is done, I experience the joy of a loving relationship with God.

C. You are beginning to sound like Euthydemus.

EUTHYDEMUS. So, Socrates, you found God!

S. You could say that, Euthydemus, or God found me. But rest assured, I have not thrown away my critical faculties!

A. I expect you are now going to explain how your critical faculties allow you to believe in God?

S. Yes Adeimantus. This for me will be the most difficult part of all our conversations. I must convey to you how and why I believe in God. It has been easy enough to talk about science, and to criticise humanism, but what is it that attracts me to a life of faith, and to Christianity in particular? The problem is not that my ideas are unclear, but rather that it is difficult to find the words to do justice to enchantment.

C. I can see this being a long session.

S. Bear with me while I do my best. The first thing I need to talk about is the idea of God. I say ‘the idea of God’ because I don’t want to be sidetracked at this stage by the question of whether God really exists. Even an atheist can agree that the idea of God exists. I want to look at the core idea of the human concept of God, leaving aside the theological frills and pious niceties. Whether or not God exists objectively, humans formed this conception of God as a person external to themselves. The idea of God was not conceived by any one person. It may be, or at least it appears as, a process of revelation. In any case, it is the product of a kind of collective wisdom. Some would call it a work of the Holy Spirit, in the sense of a team, or collective, spirit.

E. Don’t you accept the scriptures as pure revelation?

S. No, Euthydemus, not as you might imagine, as a kind of dictation. My understanding of revelation is of a rigorous process of interpreting the events of history as the actions of God, to refine the concept of God. It has been a process of doubt and searching, a refinement in the fires of history. The best minds have worked on it. They have not abandoned their reason. On the contrary, any aspect of the concept that does not fit the lessons of history has been abandoned.

A. Your revelation is not a scientific process, Socrates.

S. It is not, Adeimantus. As we have previously discussed at length, the scientific method deals with repeatable phenomena. History is a series of ‘one-offs’; it is not amenable to science. We have previously talked about the fact that science can neither prove, nor disprove the existence of God. It cannot even say whether or not the idea of God is a useful one.

E. Do you put any credence at all in the Bible?

S. Certainly, it is the record of that historical search and refinement.

C. So, you take the Bible as history?

S. I wouldn’t describe the Bible as history in the sense of the modern academic disciple. As I said, in a broad sense it is the record of interpretation of history. When it says, ‘Jesus went to Jerusalem’, it is close to history: when it says, ‘God made the world in six days’ it is not history but something different.

E. But didn’t God make the world in six days?

S. Have you not been listening, Euthydemus? The geological and paleontological record of the Earth are very much against creation in six days. Geology and palaeontology are scientific disciplines based on a whole host of more basic and repeatable experiments. The Genesis story was never meant to be taken literally. It is about the relationship between God and Man. Far from being the product of ‘illiterate herdsmen’ as Grayling disparagingly says, it is the product of sophisticated thought. I challenge anyone to read the bible with an open mind and not be impressed, even moved, by the scope and wisdom.

C. I’ve looked into bits of it at times and been thoroughly bewildered by it.

S. Don’t be discouraged, Critobulus. The Bible, especially the oldest parts, are a foreign land to us moderns. A few pointers and guides will help you to navigate through it and make sense of it. If you like, I will now take you on a lightning tour of bits that tell us about the idea of God.

C. Well, if it really will be a lightning tour, go ahead.

S. Despite your bewilderment, Critobulus, you probably know that the story begins with Abraham. Abraham was evidently a man of singular genius and creativity. He lived under a spell of enchantment, rather like Don Quixote. Abraham rejected the state gods of his home town and went his own way. His God was a personal God, his own personal God. Abraham experienced God almost physically; he is said to have wrestled with God. It is fair to describe Abraham as an illiterate herdsman. Like any wandering tribesman or peasant, he thought in terms of ‘the deal’. He made a deal, or covenant, with God under which Abraham and his descendent were to remain true to God, while in return God would make of them a great nation.

C. It sounds to me like a reinterpretation of events after they happened.

S. That may well be the case, Critobulus, but it is the history of the idea of God we are concerned with, and that is the history of the idea, as far as we know it. Next, we find that Abraham has not completely freed himself from the traditions of the people around him, who practised infant sacrifice to appease their gods. Abraham felt commanded to sacrifice his first son, Isaac. He was about the perform the act when he spotted a sheep tangled in a briar and felt commanded to substitute the sheep for Isaac. And so we have the beginning of the idea that the sacrifice of one life can redeem the life of others.

A. I’ve never understood the concept of sacrifice.

S. I have struggled with it myself, Adeimantus. As a theological abstraction, it doesn’t have much appeal. I find it more helpful to think about sacrifice as an aspect of very practical human activity. For Grayling’s illiterate herdsman it made perfect sense as part of the transactional give-and-take of deal making – I give you something in return for what you give me. For them, it had to be like-for-like. So, they offer up a life in return for the protection of their own life.

C. Very down-to-earth!

S. Closer to home, our experience of life tells us that combatting evil, by which I mean the evil that people do to each other, requires some people to sacrifice themselves for the sake of others. From this, we abstract the idea that atonement for sin requires a sacrifice. But let us return to our history of the idea of God. What happens next, Euthydemus?

E. The Israelites go down to Egypt and Moses leads them out.

S. Yes, they go down into Egypt. At this stage, God is still the God of the descendants of Abraham and their retainers. Israel is a new name for Jacob, Abraham’s grandson. In Egypt the Israelites are no doubt exposed to more sophisticated ideas about the deities, but they are also horrified by the apparatus of the state religion of Egypt, which is all about maintaining the power of Pharoah and the total subjugation of everyone else. The Israelites maintain their religious separateness, although they are physically enslaved. Along comes Moses. As the story goes, Moses was raised in Pharoah’s court and was probably literate. Even so, he was susceptible to enchantment and, while minding sheep, encountered God in the burning bush. God reveals his name, Yahweh, meaning, ‘I am he who is’ (The New Jerusalem Bible 1985, Exodus 3:14), or ‘I am who I am,’ or in its shortest form, just ‘I.’ Whatever the origin of this name, it both ancient and a great intellectual leap from the personal God of Abraham. God is now a transcendent being, the ground of being, beyond time and space. But He is still one God among many.

E. Moses saw God on Mount Sinai.

S. So the history of the idea goes, Euthydemus. You know the story of the exodus. Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt amid great signs and wonders, and they wandered in the desert for forty years before entering the Promised Land. During this time, Moses went up Mount Sinai and saw God walk past. The truly remarkable thing is what God said about himself: ‘”Yahweh, Yahweh, God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in faithful love and constancy, maintaining his faithful love to thousands, forgiving fault, crime and sin, yet letting nothing go unchecked …”’ (The New Jerusalem Bible 1985, Exodus 34:6). If only as a literary creation, this is a brilliant passage. It shows that the idea of God has evolved from the primitive dealmaker of Abraham to a moral force. God is now holy, meaning possessing a sacred purity, unlike the profane and corrupt gods of Egypt. On Mount Sinai, Moses receives the tablets of the Ten Commandments, the beginning of the Law.

C. And from there it was all downhill!

S. So your postmodernist friends would say, Critobulus. But I say morality is essential to good society. ‘When there is no shared morality, there is no society’, said Jonathan Sacks (Sacks 2020, Introduction). This realisation was a great step forward for humanity. It was an essential step towards a society free of the shackles of the authoritarian state. We will talk about this another time.¹ The Ten Commandments were a novel codification of the natural law that many peoples of that time would have understood and agreed with, but they came with a surprising addition that I will come to in a minute. At this point, God renews his covenant with the Israelites in the terms, ‘I shall take you as my people and I shall be your God’ (The New Jerusalem Bible 1985, Exodus 6:7, Jeremiah 30:22). God vows to lead his people to the Promised Land. In return, they must be holy by keeping the Law: ‘you must therefore be holy because I am holy’ (The New Jerusalem Bible 1985, Leviticus 11:45).

A. This seems to be getting away from the enchantment of Abraham and Moses.

S. The Law, as laid down in Leviticus can seem dry, even harsh, but at its heart is the striving for the mystical relationship between God and his people. Its full return to the realm of enchantment comes much later with the advent of Jesus. Before I go there, I must jump back to Genesis, which in the development of the idea of God comes later than the stories of Abraham and Moses. Now, Euthydemus, what tree was in the middle of the garden of Eden?

E. The tree of life.

S. And what other tree?

E. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

S. And what did God say about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?

E. God said to Adam and Eve: ‘But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you are not to eat; for the day you eat of that, you are doomed to die.’ (The New Jerusalem Bible 1985, Genesis 2:17)

S. You know your bible, Euthydemus! Now Critobulus, what does this story mean?

C. That it was nasty of God to put such a dangerous tree in the garden.

S. Let me give you another perspective, Critobulus. God created humans as rational beings. They were aware of good and evil, but to eat of that tree meant to take upon themselves the power to decide what is good and evil and to act accordingly, usurping God’s power and claiming to be morally independent from God. Now, another test for Euthydemus. I hinted a minute ago at a surprising addition to natural law in the Ten Commandments. What would you say is the surprising commandment, Euthydemus?

E. The first, of course: ‘You shall have no other gods to rival me.’ (The New Jerusalem Bible 1985, Genesis 20:3) The second and third commandments are related to the first: they about not taking God’s name in vain and keeping the Sabbath day holy. The rest of the commandments are about the relationships between people, which you have classed as natural law.

S. You are a genuine scholar, Euthydemus. So, Critobulus, in terms of the first commandment, what is the problem with deciding for myself what is good and what is evil?

C. Help me, Adeimantus!

A. I think Socrates is suggesting that to decide for yourself what is good and what is evil is to put yourself in place of God, in effect making a god of yourself, and thereby violating the first commandment.

S. Got it in one, Adeimantus. Remembering that God’s name is ‘I,’ a biblical scholar² once told me that the first commandment basically says, ‘My I is bigger than your I.’ Do you think the Genesis story is just a whimsical creation myth, Critobulus?

C. I suspect there is a deeper meaning, Socrates.

S. Is it the work of an illiterate herdsman, do you think?

A. At the very least the Genesis story is the work of a literary genius.

S. The Genesis story is saying something profound and fundamental about human nature. When it says, if you take on yourself the right to decide good and evil you will die, it is saying that all the trouble in the world is a consequence of doing just that. This is the massive error that the humanists make. If I decide for myself what is good, that is fine if my choice does not affect anyone else. But most of our important choices do affect other people, that is why they are important. What if other people don’t agree with my choice? We have the beginnings of conflict.

C. But if I can’t bring myself to believe in God, what options do I have?

S. If you were humble enough, Critobulus, and I like to think you are getting there, you might accept that the idea of God has merit in itself. If I, as a humanist, conceded that the idea of God is a human invention that says something useful and true about human nature, having been refined over a long time through a rigorous and collaborative process, I might also concede that if other people adopted the same idea, then we might agree on a morality which enables us to live harmoniously.

C. I agree, but I also think you are dreaming if you expect it to happen!

A. Don’t forget, Critobulus, that for centuries Christians agreed on a common morality, and we are aware that society seems to be becoming more fractured than it used to be now that many people have stopped believing.

S. Well said, Adeimantus, and the other major religions achieved the same result. I propose to develop this theme further when we discuss the underpinnings of society.³ For today, I want to return to the question of why anyone would want to believe in God, and all that goes with that belief. I was saying that in my view the motivation is enchantment, and that enchantment is about encounter with God, and that encounter with God requires you to be holy because God is holy, and that means both personal and communal adherence to God’s law. But what happens if we fall away from holiness, personally or as a community? This is what we call sin. Are we done for?

E. There is atonement and forgiveness, Socrates.

S. Yes. You see, Critobulus, Euthydemus understands these things. Just because he sometimes loses a philosophical argument, we must not conclude that he is bereft of wisdom. Atonement and forgiveness are two sides of the same coin. They are about setting things right after someone has transgressed against another. Humanists and other atheists tend to shun these concepts because they are associated with religion, but the idea of atonement especially is something that is embedded deeply in the human psyche, don’t you agree, Critobulus?

C. Give me an example, Socrates.

S. Are not your postmodernist friends, and cynics in general, always demanding atonement from someone? Let’s suppose they discover that your great, great, great, grandfather was a slave trader, or might have been one. Do they not then expect you to offer atonement by making an abject apology and offering reparation?

C. Yes. Fortunately, no evidence has come to light about slave traders among my ancestors.

S. But if evidence were to come to light, Critobulus, you can be sure that the cynics would require you to repent over and over again. There would be no way to satisfy them that the stain was gone from your character. No amount of reparation, or shall we call it sacrifice, would satisfy them. They might eventually get bored and move onto persecuting another transgressor, but they would never forgive you. Do you agree?

C. Yes, I have sensed that my former friends are very unforgiving, and it has bothered me.

S. Forgiving was always encouraged in the Jewish religion, but it was Jesus who made it central to Christianity. In the few words of the Lord’s Prayer which Jesus taught us, we say, ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us’. When Peter asks him how many times we are to forgive, Jesus replies, ‘Not seven, I tell you, but seventy-seven times’ (The New Jerusalem Bible 1985, Matthew 18:22), meaning as many times as it takes. Atonement and forgiveness are all about restoring harmony in the community. The community is then at rights with itself. If the community is at rights with itself, then it is at rights with God, since this is what God demands of us in the covenant. There is a sense in which God is the personification of the spirit of the community, or enters into the spirit of the community. When the community is at war with itself, God cannot enter into it. This is why Jesus said you must love your enemy. If you love your enemy, you will forgive him. Only then can there be harmony in the community.

A. Isn’t that a bit like the idea of the state religion, the god being the personification of the state?

S. It is similar, but the Christian God is unlike the gods of other state religions in that He cares equally about every citizen and subject of the state. The Christian God is not happy while the lowliest subject of the community is unhappy. Actually, Christian communities prefer to think of themselves as being an offering to God, distinct from God but holy as God is holy. If they put themselves on a par with God, that would be close to breaking the first commandment, as we have just discussed.

C. I don’t think the humanists are big on forgiveness.

S. Nor are they big on sacrifice. Grayling in his book uses the words ‘forgive,’ forgiveness,’ or ‘forgiven’ only four times and usually in a negative sense. Never in his exposition of the humanist ethic does he advocate forgiveness as a way of restoring harmony in relationships. Tolerance is the nearest he gets to it, but tolerance is a hands-off response, while forgiveness requires the active embrace of the other party.

E. Forgiveness is an act of love and may require sacrifice.

S. Indeed, love, forgiveness, and sacrifice are closely bound together, Euthydemus. Consider the humanist Grayling’s discussion of living authentically. He says, ‘To live inauthentically is to be enslaved, at least in part, to the falsity of the person one thus is’ (Grayling 2013, Ch. 14). He gives the example of marriages where one or both partners are ‘living a lie’ because of ‘the compromises, pretences and bald untruths that help to hold the relationship together’. Now, the partners may be living ‘inauthentically’ in this way out of selfishness or laziness because they will lose in some way if they leave the relationship. On the other hand, they may be staying in the relationship out of love for the partner. They may be constantly forgiving the partner’s difficult behaviour and sacrificing, to some extent, their own happiness to maintain the harmony of the wider family and community. In a situation like this, the stronger party is the one who is able to make a sacrifice for the good of the weaker party. This self-sacrificing love is at the heart of Jesus’ message.

E. I was wondering when you were going to come to Jesus.

A. We can hardly have a discussion of Christianity without mentioning Jesus. Who do you say Jesus was, Socrates?

S. I say, along with Peter, that Jesus is the son of God (The New Jerusalem Bible 1985, Matthew 16:13). But give me time to explain what I mean by that. Historically, the physical, material Jesus was a man who lived in the place some call the Holy Land about two thousand years ago. He opposed the Jewish religious elites, and they got the Romans to execute him.

C. What was his problem with the Jewish elites?

S. He accused them of being hypocrites and like ‘whitened sepulchres’, saying they looked fine on the outside but were full of corruption inside. They were fastidious about obeying the Jewish law externally, but they failed to uphold the spirit of the law. They looked down on people they considered inferior to themselves and classed them as sinners. They despised these ordinary folk as unfit for the kingdom of God.

A. They sound like the elites that plague us today.

S. Jesus cared about the outcasts and the excluded. He saw them as the ‘lost sheep’ of the house of Israel and he saw it as his mission to give them hope of entering the kingdom of God. His understanding was that God cared as much for the lowest members of society as for anyone. In a parable he said, ‘In truth I tell you, in so far as you did this [provided help] to one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it to me.’ (The New Jerusalem Bible 1985, Matthew 25:40). Jesus condemned the elites, telling them, ‘In truth I tell you, tax collectors and prostitutes are making their way into the kingdom of God before you.’ (The New Jerusalem Bible 1985, Matthew 21:31).

C. I don’t suppose the elites took that too well!

A. Your criticism of humanists sounds much like Jesus’ criticism of the Jewish elites.

S. There is more than a passing resemblance. The Scribes, Pharisees, and Sadducees rated as the ‘learned and wise’ in their world. They saw it as their role to lay down the law. The Scribes were the ‘comfortable professors’ of their day.

C. Comfortable professors are not much called on to make sacrifices ….

S. Except of their valuable time, Critobulus!

C. Humanists would be frothing at the mouth at your suggestion they are like the ultra-religious Pharisees!

S. Although the Pharisees believed in God, they were materialist at heart, like the humanists. They made much of their physical descent from Abraham, which they though set them apart as the chosen race. Jesus abruptly dismissed their claim, saying, ‘God can raise children for Abraham from these stones.’ (The New Jerusalem Bible 1985, Matthew 3:9). Again, he criticised the Pharisees emphasis on external, physical adherence to the Law, rather than their internal disposition. He said, ‘What goes into the mouth does not make anyone unclean; it is what comes out of the mouth that makes someone unclean’ (The New Jerusalem Bible 1985, Matthew 15:11), meaning what someone says reveals their heart and mind, their internal disposition.

E. Jesus said, ‘God is spirit, and those who worship must worship in spirit and truth’ (The New Jerusalem Bible 1985, John 4:24).

S. Most apt, Euthydemus, and he also said, ‘My kingdom is not of this world’ (The New Jerusalem Bible 1985, John 18:36). Jesus is saying, very clearly, that in our relationships with God, who is spirit, and with each other, it is the spirit of each person that counts. Remember, as I have said before, if you don’t believe in the objective existence of spirits, you can talk in exactly the same way about the conceptual person, the idea of the person, my idea of God, of you, and of myself.

A. But you are a realist, not and idealist, Socrates.

S. Yes, I am not saying the idea exists as a thing. It is a process of the material brain, as we have discussed previously.⁴ But in every sense, we can talk about the spirit and the conceptual person as if they were the same thing.

A. How can that be?

S. Because it is impossible to do any scientific experiment that could distinguish between them.

A. Socrates, you were going to tell us why you say Jesus is the son of God.

S. Let us consider the conceptual person, Jesus. His concept of himself was, or came to be, that he was spiritually the son of God, since God was his spiritual father. The gospels record how the disciples’ concept of the person of Jesus evolved to the point where they could also call Jesus the son of God. Jesus said, ‘Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father’ (The New Jerusalem Bible 1985, John 14:9). He was talking of God’s nature and character. I am content to go along with the disciples.

C. But Socrates, why are you hedging around with ‘spirits’ and ‘conceptual persons?’ Do you believe that Jesus was the son of God, or not?

S. I have said all this before, Critobulus, and I will say it again. Whether the spirit of God, or of Jesus, or of Socrates, exists as a real thing is impossible to say. A spirit, by definition, is immaterial and cannot be detected by scientific experiments. That does not stop me from talking about it and perhaps basing my actions on the idea of it. Whether or not the spirit exists ‘in reality’, it is the idea of it, which I have called the conceptual person, that motivates me, since that is the only way I can experience it. I could take Jesus’ word as evidence when he says he is the son of God, but that does not constitute scientific evidence, since no scientific test could ever prove him right or wrong.

C. So, you are telling us that you believe that Jesus had the idea that he was the son of an idea called God?

S. You are making fun of me, Critobulus, but as it happens you are correct. What I believe is that Jesus so conformed his own nature to his concept of God’s nature that he experienced the relationship as a mystical union so close as to be best described as a father-son relationship. When I say I believe it, I am saying that the nature of God thus revealed is the one I choose to adopt as the soundest basis for personal and communal moral life, and the framework in which I choose to imagine the existence of my own spirit or conceptual person, my own ‘life story’ if you prefer that term. And as we discussed previously⁵, I am talking about belief in the practical sense as the basis for my actions, not in the sense of assenting to a philosophical proposition.

C. I think I am starting to get it.

S. Thank God for that! The Pharisees didn’t get it, neither do the humanists. When Jesus said, ‘you will come to know the truth, and the truth will set you free’ (The New Jerusalem Bible 1985, John 8:32), he meant the truth that in him the true nature of God was revealed. This meant that Jesus was the fulfillment of the Law in the sense that obeying, as he did, the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law is the way to holiness. And the spirit of the law is love – love of God and love of neighbour - with all that entails. As Jesus also said, ‘Come to me, all you who labour and are overburdened, and I will give you rest. Shoulder my yoke and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. Yes, my yoke is easy and my burden light.’ (The New Jerusalem Bible 1985, Matthew 11:28-30)

C. I suppose he didn’t mean ‘yoke’ in the way your Petal would use the word.

S. You mean the Irish colloquial expression for ‘a particular thing’? No, Critobulus. He meant the obligation of love I just mentioned, and the fact that it was much less burdensome and much more rewarding than obsessive adherence to the letter of the law which the Pharisees advocated. His way would set them free from that obsessive adherence to the letter of the law, which was doomed to fail to produce holiness.

A. What did you mean when you said that the Pharisees and the humanists didn’t get it?

S. I meant they failed to recognise the way the Holy Spirit was moving in Jesus. That is why Jesus said the only sin that can’t be forgiven is the sin against the Holy Spirit. He was saying that by choosing to remain blind to the truth, the Holy Spirit being the spirit of truth, the sinners had cut themselves off from the source of forgiveness, leaving no way in for God. Grayling completely misunderstands what Jesus said. Grayling says (Grayling 2013, Ch. 2), ‘Are there not unforgivable things? Even the New Testament says there is one: namely, blasphemy.’ Grayling thinks that the unforgivable sin is blasphemy, but what Jesus said was more subtle than that. He said, ‘every human sin and blasphemy will be forgiven, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven.’ (The New Jerusalem Bible 1985, Matthew 12:31-32, Luke 12:10 ). He meant, as I said, failure to recognise the truth represented by Jesus.

C. Socrates, are you ever going to get to the enchantment bit?

S. I was just getting there, Critobulus. Jesus lived under enchantment. He thought of himself as the son of God. Was he deluded? Whether or not you believe this as an objective truth, he defined himself as the son of God by the sinless life he lived and the blameless death he suffered.

A. But what is the connection between enchantment and Christianity for you, Socrates?

S. For me, the experience of enchantment is about encountering mystery, about new possibilities, and the feeling of hope. It is about being free from the earth-bound body and letting the mind wander in space and time, not in the physical world, but somewhere behind and beyond the physical world into a spiritual world. And in that world must be God, whose spirit is everywhere and eternal. Have you never gazed at the sunset and felt that there must be something beyond the horizon, not a physical but a spiritual place, the western isles as Tolkien called them, where spirits go when thy have completed their time in Middle Earth?

C. When I look out from the coast at sunset, I mainly think about a lot of sharks between me and Africa.

S. You are very prosaic, Critobulus. It is difficult to do justice to enchantment in prose. The old Irish fairy stories of Fionn Mac Cumhaill come close, although they are hardly prose in the modern sense.

A. I live in hope of seeing the Salmon of Knowledge.

S. You won’t meet the Salmon of Knowledge in this world, Adeimantus, which is my point. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is an extended meditation on the intersection of the physical world and the spiritual world. A battle between good and evil rages in the spiritual world and at times spills over into the physical world. The war makes demands on ordinary people, who respond either with courage and sacrifice, or by looking after their own interests. In the end, those who have fought the good fight make their way to eternal life in the western isles. The heroes are drawn on by enchantment, by glimpses of the spirit world where the meaning and purpose of everything is exposed. The working of enchantment, along with justice and mercy, only becomes apparent through a long saga, which is why The Lord of the Rings is so long. I have read the whole work three times, and I could talk about it all day.

C. Please spare us, Socrates!

A. Of course, other forms of art could express enchantment more succinctly, perhaps. Someone once said the purpose of art is to express the inexplicable.

S. Yes, as I think I said in a previous conversation⁶, painting and music can sometimes give us the experience of enchantment. So can drama, but rarely, I think. There is one play I would like to tell you about. Our life may be mundane and apparently without any purpose or meaning, other than any purpose or meaning we decide for ourselves. Thornton Wilder in Our Town tried to say how this life is wonderful in all its tiny moments. Do you know about the play?

A. I had to study it at school, but I have forgotten whatever I knew about it.

S. It is about a young woman, Emily, who returns from the grave to visit her family. She can see then, but they can’t see or hear her. She exhorts her mother to understand how miraculous and wonderful every moment of life is, but her mother does not hear. As she returns to her grave she asks the stage manager, ‘”Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? every, every minute?” “No,” he answers. “The saints and poets, maybe they do some.”’ (Long 2021). I describe that feeing of the miraculous and wonderful nature of the ordinary as enchantment, and I think the feeling that ordinary events are significant comes from seeing them as part of something bigger and eternal. Religion, I find, helps to achieve that perspective.

A. You don’t think that humanists are sensitive to enchantment?

S. No I don’t, Adeimantus. The experience of enchantment requires a spiritual outlook, and humanists deliberately close themselves to spirituality because it’s irrational. Enchantment is all about passion. Faith is more like a love affair than a philosophical argument. This is what draws me to faith and what I find missing in the humanists, that passionate grasp on life which seeks to lay hold of what is real in all its goodness and its badness, to give great thanks for the good, to wrestle with the bad, to see the best, to forgive the wrong, to be swept along with all in the journey to the creator and to eternity. This is the passion that gives rise to great art and great love.

A. You are waxing lyrical, Socrates!

S. Do you remember the story I told you in an earlier conversation, the one about enchantment, about the time I was walking through the garden at my university, on my way back to the Physics lab, when I heard a young girl say to her father, ‘There might be fairies under those bushes’, and how I was shocked and not a little saddened to hear the father reply angrily, ‘There is no such thing as fairies. Don’t talk about them.’ The man missed the point his daughter was trying to express. She was not making a philosophical proposition about the existence of fairies, but trying to express her sense of enchantment at the beauty of the garden, which she must have felt to be mysterious. I thought then that the man was a fool, and I still think that. Now, fifty years later, I am reading A.C. Grayling arguing against the existence of God and I feel that he, if not strictly a fool, has also missed the point. When I hear a great symphony written about an ethical argument, I might change my mind.

C. What do you think a humanist feels when he or she looks at a sunset?

S. I expect they marvel at the thought that we can see the relative motion of the sun and the earth as the earth rotates. I marvel at that too, but I also have a sense of God in heaven somewhere beyond and behind the physical event. I suppose that all spiritual people experience something like that at some time.

A. Might those spiritual people also experience the dark side, evil?

S. I have not. For me, the fear is not making it to the western isles. That would be hell. Now, I hope I have given you a glimpse of how enchantment led me to Christianity.

A. Yes, Socrates, but there are many things about religion we might still challenge you on.

S. Let’s leave your challenges until tomorrow, Adeimantus. We have done enough for today.

C. Thank God for that!

References

Grayling, A. C. 2013. The God Argument: The Case against Religion and for Humanism. Bloomsbury.

Long, Thomas G. 2021. "Is Our Town everybody’s town?" The Christian Century. May 19. Accessed February 16, 2022. https://www.christiancentury.org/article/books/our-town-everybody-s-town.

Sacks, Jonathan. 2020. Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times. Hodder and Stoughton.

1985. The New Jerusalem Bible. London: Darton, Longman, & Todd.

1. See the conversation on Society.

2. The Reverand Peter Burrows.

3. See the conversation on Society.

4. See the conversation on The Conscious Human.

5. See the conversation on Belief.

6. See the conversation on Enchantment.