Nothing to Be Frightened Of

  Differences between brothers: when I was at the age of maximum teenage embarrassment, one of my parents’ friends asked Dad, in front of me, which of his sons was the cleverer. My father had his eye—his gentle, liberal eye—on me as he carefully replied: “Jonathan probably. Julian’s more of an all-rounder, wouldn’t you say so, Ju?” I was obliged to be complicit in the judgement (with which I probably agreed anyway). But I also recognized the euphemism. Rest of the World, Low Voice, All-Rounder: huh.

  The differences my mother observed in her two sons pleased me more. “When they were boys, if I was ill, Julian climbed into bed and snuggled up to me, while his brother brought me a cup of tea.” Another distinction she reported: my brother once cacked his pants and responded with the words, “It will never happen again”—and it didn’t; whereas, when I failed to control my infant bowels, I was discovered merrily smearing my shit into the cracks between the floorboards. My favourite differentiation, however, was made much later in our mother’s life. By this time both her sons were established in their separate fields. This is how she expressed her pride in them: “One of my sons writes books I can read but can’t understand, and the other writes books I can understand but can’t read.”

  Whenever I used to reflect on our divergent natures, I would often ascribe it to a puerperal detail. After my brother’s birth, our mother had been ill with a streptococcal infection. Unable to breastfeed, she had raised him on whatever bottle-gruel was available in the wartime England of 1942. I knew that my birth, in 1946, had occurred without medical complication, and therefore I must have been breastfed. In moments of sibling competitiveness I would fall back on this essential fact. He was the clever one, all icy intellect and practical action, the shit-retaining tea-bearer; I was the all-rounder, the snuggler, the shit-smearer, the emotional one. He had the brain as he had the British Empire; I had the Rest of the World in all its rich diversity. This was pathetically reductivist, of course, and whenever critics and commentators applied similar reductivism to art (El Greco simplified into a case of astigmatism, Schumann’s music the notation of approaching madness), I would be grossly irritated. But I hugged this explanation to myself at a time when I needed it—a time when observers of my emotional life might have concluded that I wasn’t collecting Rest of the World so much as specializing in rare postmarks of Norway and the Faroe Islands.

  Chapter 21

  Fear of death replaces fear of God. But fear of God—an entirely sane early principle, given the hazard of life and our vulnerability to thunderbolts of unknown origin—at least allowed for negotiation. We talked God down from being the Vengeful One and rebranded Him the Infinitely Merciful; we changed Him from Old to New, like the Testaments and the Labour Party. We levered up His graven image, put it on runners, and dragged it to a place where the weather was sunnier. We can’t do the same with death. Death can’t be talked down, or parlayed into anything; it simply declines to come to the negotiating table. It doesn’t have to pretend to be Vengeful or Merciful, or even Infinitely Merciless. It is impervious to insult, complaint, or condescension. “Death is not an artist”: no, and would never claim to be one. Artists are unreliable; whereas death never lets you down, remains on call seven days a week, and is happy to work three consecutive eight-hour shifts. You would buy shares in death, if they were available; you would bet on it, however poor the odds. When my brother and I were growing up, there was a minor celebrity called Dr. Barbara Moore, a long-distance walker and propagandizing vegetarian who thought she could outface nature; she once told a newspaper, a little ambitiously, that she would have a baby at 100 and live to be 150. She didn’t get even halfway there. She died at seventy-three, and not at the hands of an anxious book-maker either. Oddly, she did death’s work for it, starving herself into extinction. That was a fine day on the exchange for death.

  Atheists in morally superior Category One (no God, no fear of death) like to tell us that the lack of a deity should not in any way diminish our sense of wonder at the universe. It may have all seemed both miraculous and user-friendly when we imagined God had laid it on especially for us, from the harmony of the snowflake and the complex allusiveness of the passion flower to the spectacular showmanship of a solar eclipse. But if everything still moves without a Prime Mover, why should it be less wonderful and less beautiful? Why should we be children needing the teacher to show us things, as if God were some superior version of a TV wildlife expert? The Antarctic penguin, for instance, is just as regal and comic, just as graceful and awkward, whether pre-or post-Darwin. Grow up, and let’s examine together the allure of the double helix, the darkling glimmer of deep space, the infinite adjustments of plumage which demonstrate the laws of evolution, and the packed, elusive mechanism of the human brain. Why do we need some God to help us marvel at such things?

  We don’t. Not really. And yet. If what is out there comes from nothing, if all is unrolling mechanically according to a programme laid down by nobody, and if our perceptions of it are mere micromoments of biochemical activity, the mere snap and crackle of a few synapses, then what does this sense of wonder amount to? Should we not be a little more suspicious of it? A dung beetle might well have a primitive sense of awe at the size of the mighty dung ball it is rolling. Is this wonder of ours merely a posher version? Perhaps, the Category One atheist might reply, but at least it is based on a knowledge of what is the case. Compare the soppy fantasies of that disciple of Rousseau, who claimed that the striations on the rind of a melon were God’s handiwork—the Almighty nannyishly marking the fruit into fair and equal portions for His children. Do you want to go back to such preposterous thinking, to the gastronome’s pathetic fallacy? Where is your sense of truth?

  Still hanging in there, I hope. Though—just out of interest—it would be useful to know whether an atheist’s sense of wonder at the universe is quantifiably as great as that of a believer. No reason why we can’t measure such things (if not now, soon). We can compare the number of synapses that fire during the female and the male orgasm—very bad news for competitive blokes—so why not try a similar test? Find some anchorite who still believes that the passion flower illustrates Christ’s suffering: that the leaf symbolizes the spear, the five anthers the five wounds, the tendrils the whips, the column of the ovary the pillar of the cross, the stamens the hammers, the three styles the three nails, the fleshy threads within the flower the crown of thorns, the calyx the nimbus, the white tint purity and the blue tint heaven. This monk would also believe that the flower stays open for precisely three days, one for each year of Christ’s ministry. Wire him up alongside a TV botanist and let’s see who fires the more synapses. And then let’s take the wiring kit along to a concert hall and test my “very irreligious” friend J. against a believer who will listen to that Haydn Mass as a full expression of eternal truth as well as—or instead of—a great piece of music. Then we shall be able to see, and measure, what happens when you take the religion out of religious art, and God out of the universe.

  This may seem like rather desperate stuff to those cool minds who thrill even more to the beauty of scientific law precisely because it is not God’s handicraft. But if this sounds like nostalgia, it’s nostalgia for something I’ve never known—which is, admittedly, the more toxic kind. Maybe another part of my condition is envy of those who lost faith—or gained truth—when losing faith was fresh and young and bold and dangerous. François Renard, suicide and anti-clerical, was the first person to be buried in the cemetery at Chitry without the aid and comfort of a priest. Imagine the shock of that in the remote Burgundy countryside in 1897; imagine the pride of unbelief. Maybe I’m suffering from—well, call it historical remorse, so that my grandfather can sympathize.

  Chapter 22

  “A happy atheist.” The date I might have advanced to college chaplain and captain of boats as the key moment when aesthetic rapture began to replace religious awe, is January 1811; the place, Florence. It was a few days before Stendhal’s twenty-eighth birthday—or rath
er, the twenty-eighth birthday of Henri Beyle, who had not yet transformed himself into his nom de plume. Beyle/Stendhal did not believe in God, and affected a logical ignorance of His existence: “Waiting for God to reveal himself, I believe that his prime minister, Chance, governs this sad world just as well.” He continued: “I feel I am an honest man, and that it would be impossible to be otherwise, not for the sake of pleasing a Supreme Being who does not exist, but for my own sake, who need to live in peace with my habits and prejudices and to give purpose to my life and nourishment to my thoughts.”

  In 1811 Beyle was the impoverished author of plagiaristic musical biographies, and had begun a history of Italian painting he was never to complete. He had first come to Italy as a seventeen-year-old in the baggage-train of Napoleon’s army. When the camp followers reached Ivrea, Beyle immediately went looking for the town’s opera house. He found a third-rate theatre with a down-at-heel company playing Cimarosa’s Il Matrimonio segreto, but it came as a revelation: “un bonheur divin,” he reported to his sister. From that moment, he became a profound and tremulous admirer of Italy, susceptible to all its aspects: once, returning to Milan after many years, he noted that “the very particular odour of horse dung in the streets” moved him to tears.

  And now he comes to Florence for the first time. He is arriving from Bologna; the coach crosses the Apennines and begins its descent towards the city. “My heart was leaping wildly within me. What utterly childlike excitement!” As the road bends, the cathedral, with Brunelleschi’s famous dome, comes into sight. At the city gate, he abandons the coach—and his luggage—to enter Florence on foot, like a pilgrim. He finds himself at the church of Santa Croce. Here are the tombs of Michelangelo and Galileo; nearby is Canova’s bust of Alfieri. He thinks of the other great Tuscans: Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch. “The tide of emotion that overwhelmed me flowed so deep that it was scarce to be distinguished from religious awe.” He asks a friar to unlock the Niccolini Chapel and let him look at the frescoes. He seats himself “on the step of a faldstool, with my head thrown back to rest upon the desk, so that I might let my gaze dwell on the ceiling.” The city and the proximity of its famous children have already put Beyle in a state of near trance. Now he is “absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty”; he attains “the supreme degree of sensibility where the divine intimations of art merge with the impassioned sensuality of emotion.” The italics are his.

  The physical consequence of all this is a fainting fit. “As I emerged from the porch of Santa Croce, I was seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart . . . The wellspring of life dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground.” Beyle (who was Stendhal by the time he published this account in Rome, Naples and Florence) could describe his symptoms but not name his condition. Posterity, however, can, since posterity always knows best. Beyle was suffering, we can now tell him, from Stendhal’s Syndrome, a condition identified in 1979 by a Florentine psychiatrist who had noted almost a hundred cases of dizziness and nausea brought on by exposure to the city’s art treasures. A recent issue of Firenze Spettacolo helpfully lists the prime sites to avoid if you might be susceptible to this syndrome—or, for that matter, to visit, should you want to tough it out aesthetically. The top three are “Santa Croce’s Cappella Niccolini, with Giotto’s Frescoes,” the Accademia for Michelangelo’s David, and the Uffizi for Botticelli’s Primavera.

  The sceptical might wonder if those hundred or so dizzy twentieth-century visitors were indeed suffering from a violent aesthetic reaction, or merely from the rigours of the modern tourist’s life: city confusion, timetable stress, masterpiece anxiety, information overload, and too much hot sun mixed with chilly air-conditioning. The very sceptical might wonder whether Stendhal himself was really suffering from Stendhal’s Syndrome. What he describes might have been the cumulative effect of successive powerful impressions: the mountains, the dome, the arrival, the church, the mighty dead, the great art—and hence the final swoon. A medical, rather than psychiatric, opinion might also be useful: if you sit with your head back, staring for a long time at a painted wall, and then get to your feet and walk from the cool darkness of a church into the bright, dusty, frenetic swirl of a city, might you not expect to feel a little faint?

  But still, the story remains. Beyle/Stendhal is the modern art-lover’s progenitor and justification. He went to Florence and fainted at great art. He was in a church, but he was not a religious man, and his rapture was purely secular and aesthetic. And who would not understand and envy a man swooning at the Giottos in Santa Croce, the more so as he was seeing them with a mind and eye untrammelled by previous reproduction? The story is true, not least because we want it, we need it to be true.

  Genuine pilgrims arriving at Santa Croce five centuries before Beyle would have seen in Giotto’s newly painted fresco cycle of the life of St. Francis an art that told them the absolute truth, and could save them, in this world and the next. It would have been the same for those who first read Dante, or first heard Palestrina. The more beautiful because true, the more true because beautiful, and these joyful multiplications continuing in an eternity of parallel mirrors. In a secular world, where we cross ourselves and genuflect before great works of art in a purely metaphorical way, we tend to believe that art tells us the truth—that’s to say, in a relativist universe, more truth than anything else—and that in turn this truth can save us—up to a point—that’s to say, enlighten us, move us, elevate us, even heal us—though only in this world. How much simpler it used to be, and not just grammatically.

  Flaubert rebuked Louise Colet for having “the love of art” but not “the religion of art.” Some see art as a psychological replacement for religion, still supplying a sense of the world beyond themselves to those reduced creatures who now no longer dream of heaven. One modern critic, Professor S. of Cambridge, argues that art is essentially religious because the artist aims at immortality by avoiding “the banal democracy of death.” This grand statement is rebutted by Professor C. of Oxford, who points out that even the greatest art lasts no more than an eye-blink in geological time. The two statements are, I suppose, compatible, since the artist’s motivation might ignore the subsequent cosmic reality. But Professor C. has a grand statement of his own, namely that “The religion of art makes people worse, because it encourages contempt for those considered inartistic.” There may be something in this, though the larger problem, in Britain at least, is that of contempt from the opposite direction: from the complacent philistine towards those who practise and value the arts. And do such feelings make them better people?

  “The religion of art”: when Flaubert used the expression, he was talking about the dedicated practice, not the snobbish worship, of art; the monkishness required, the hair shirt, and the silent, solitary meditation before the act. If art is to be compared to a religion, it’s certainly not one in the traditional Catholic mode, with papal authoritarianism above and obedient servitude below. Rather, it is something like the early Church: fertile, chaotic, and schismatic. For every bishop there is a blasphemer; for every dogma there is a heretic. In art now, as in religion then, false prophets and false gods abound. There are artistic priest-hoods (disapproved of by Professor C.) which seek to exclude the unwashed, which disappear into hermetic intellectualism and inaccessible refinement. On the other side (and disapproved of by Professor S.) there is inauthenticity, mercantilism, and an infantile populism; artists who flatter and compromise, who dodge for votes (and cash) like politicians. Pure or impure, high-minded or corrupt, all—like golden lads and girls and chimney-sweepers—will come to dust, and their art not long afterwards, if not before. But art and religion will always shadow one another through the abstract nouns they both invoke: truth, seriousness, imagination, sympathy, morality, transcendence.

  Chapter 23

  Missing God is for me rather like Being English: a feeling roused mainly by attack. When my country is abused, a dormant, not to say narcoleptic, patriotism stirs. And
when it comes to God, I find myself more provoked by atheistic absolutism than by, say, the often bland tentative hopefulness of the Church of England. The other month, I found myself at dinner with neighbours. A dozen of us around a kitchen table long enough to seat Christ and his disciples. Several conversations were proceeding simultaneously, when an argument suddenly spiked a few places away and a young man (the son of the house) shouted sarcastically, “But why should God do that for His son and not for the rest of us?” I found myself uncivilly turning out of my own conversation and shouting back, “Because He’s God, for Christ’s sake.” The exchange spread; my host C., an old friend and notorious rationalist, backed up his son: “There’s a book about how people survived crucifixion, how sometimes they weren’t dead when they were taken down. The centurions could be bribed.” Me: “What’s that got to do with it?” He (exasperatedly rationalist): “The point is, it couldn’t have happened. It couldn’t have happened.” Me (rationally exasperated with rationality): “But that’s the whole point—that it couldn’t have happened. The point is, that if you’re a Christian, it did.” I might have added that his argument was as old as . . . well, at least as old as Madame Bovary, where Homais, the bigoted materialist, declares the notion of the Resurrection to be not only “absurd” but “contrary to all the laws of physics.”

  Such scientific objections and “explanations”—Christ wasn’t “really” walking on the water, but on a thin sheet of ice, which, under certain meteorological conditions . . . would have convinced me in my youth. Now they seem quite irrelevant. As Stravinsky put it, reasoned proof (and hence disproof ) is to religion no more than what counterpoint exercises are to music. Faith is about believing precisely what, according to all the known rules, “could not have happened.” The Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, Mohammed leaping up to heaven leaving a foot-print in the rock, life hereafter. It couldn’t have happened by all we understand. But it did. Or it will. (Or, of course, it certainly didn’t and assuredly won’t.)