I’m reading a short work by St Bonaventure called the Five
Feasts of the Child Jesus. It was written probably in 1259. (The translation, by
Eric Doyle OFM, was published as a pamphlet in 1984 by the Sisters of the Love
of God, Oxford.)
I’m no
stranger to medieval literature – I used to specialize in it, years ago – but
now I find I’m preoccupied with what religious writing can mean to someone,
like me, who has no religious beliefs. I need to make clear where I’m coming
from here. I don’t have any consciously metaphysical beliefs at all. My sense
of wonder is reserved for reality, or nature (I use these words
interchangeably). I only wouldn’t call myself an atheist because that seems to
connote something too militant – an emphasis on the absence of God. I don’t
feel so personal a hostility.
I imagine the
professed atheist feels about God rather as I do about a corporate institution.
Something that doesn’t really exist, at least not in the way it’s talked about,
but whose supposed existence is perceived by me as a powerful force for evil.
A board member
writes to the staff: “As you know, we are
looking closely at our strategy and our costs. I believe we have a great
opportunity for a step change in performance and to provide our company with a
competitive platform for longer term growth. It is an opportunity which, with
your support, we can and must seize.”
I want to know what “we” means in these sentences. I want to know what’s
so great about something “growing” when it isn’t a living creature. I start to
pick holes in the logic (does he mean that, without our support, it is not
after all necessary to seize the opportunity? Or is there an implied threat:
You must support us?) So you see I have the atheistic temper when it comes to
companies. I want to destroy false ideas.
But as for God, well, even
the absence of God is absent to me, if I can put it that way. I am not hostile
to religion, but years have passed without me ever thinking about such
things.
The saint
begins:
“In God’s
church there are holy men and women who have been enlightened more profoundly
than others by the divine radiance and inflamed more ardently by inspiration from
on high. It is their conviction and teaching that through meditation upon Jesus
and reverent contemplation of the Incarnate Word, a faithful soul can
experience a delight far sweeter, a pleasure more thrilling and a consolation
more perfect than from honey and fragrant perfumes.”
It’s been said
(I think the phrase is Eliot’s) that in reading literature especially from the
past a “suspension of disbelief” is required of us. I don’t know if that’s
right, not if it means pretending to agree with things we don’t agree with. I
look for what I can genuinely take an interest in. My first thought is
certainly a thoroughly secular one: how odd (yet charming) to choose honey and
perfume as your instances of pleasure and consolation. What would a modern
writer say? Maybe this: a pleasure more thrilling than sex in summer rain, a
consolation more perfect than getting stoned with your friends. Because I quite
understand the point: there are even greater satisfactions than this. Or
perhaps not greater, but different, unpredictable, arresting: a vision of
nature, a piece of music that suddenly undoes us. These visionary moments often
appear when we seem passive, but cluster around activities that have to do with
our deepest values: creating art, bringing up a child, moving into a new sphere
of life, saving a wood from being bulldozed. The pleasure isn’t in the
achievement, though. It doesn’t link to what’s concrete and measurable – so
much honey or so much perfume. Even looking back at a sexual relationship, I
think the moments that stick most tenderly in our minds aren’t usually orgasmic
or even full of erotic tension. The word love comes closer to defining a common
source for these supreme experiences.
Here is the
next passage that made me catch my breath. Bonaventure is talking about what
happens to the soul in whom Christ Jesus is “conceived spiritually”.
“Now, with
Mary, the soul begins to climb the hill country (Luke 1:39) because after this
conception earthly things lose their attraction, and the soul longs for heavenly
and eternal things. The soul begins to flee the company of those with minds set
on earthly things (Phil 3:19) and desires the friendship of those with hearts
set on heavenly things. It begins to take care of Elizabeth, that is, to look
to those who are enlightened by divine wisdom and ardently inflamed by love.”
You know how
it is with walking in the hills. As you slog out of the valley you begin to see
more and more hill-tops around you. At the same time the valleys where all the
traffic of human life is going on begin to shrink into insignificance so that
after only a mile or two all your horizons are so transformed that you seem to
inhabit a different world altogether. The same thing happens socially to anyone
who finds themselves embarked on an idealistic agenda. Similarly-minded people
begin to assume a disproportionate importance. Many other aspects of human
activity begin to lose your attention. It’s a real problem for a writer,
because often the very things that you’re losing contact with are the things
you planned to write about. So you’re a writer now, you’re not an ordinary
person any more! Bonaventure and other mystics are very comfortable with the
idea of “contempt of the world”. Some such grand simplification is no doubt
necessary for anyone who tries to do anything at all difficult. It is necessary
to be fanatical. But you can see – we have all seen – how the fanatic can lose
a grip on “charity” in its widest aspect. The words I’m using are religious
words, but this is a modern problem and it concerns, I’d guess, many of the
sort of people who would be interested in browsing a website of this kind.
Lovers of poetry tend to have some sort of idealistic agenda: perhaps this is
being a parent, a teacher, a campaigner, an activist.
Here’s a
passage that I think would interest counsellors and psychologists:
“There are
others who seem to be good, religious people, and perhaps they are, but who, I
say it with respect, are far too timid. They forget that the hand of the Lord
is not yet shortened that it cannot save (Isa 59:1), nor do they remember that
the kindness of the Most High has not yet run out, that he wants to help us and
has the power to do so. … Out of compassion for physical suffering or perhaps
from fear of natural weakness, they dissuade others from the pursuit of
perfection. … Sometimes through the cunning of the ancient enemy they slyly
suggest: ‘If you take on such and such practices of piety, people will say you
are holy, good, devout and religious. And because you have not yet acquired the
virtues which others think you have, you will be judged guilty in the sight of
the Supreme Judge who knows in all their horror your great and terrible sins.
You will forfeit the merits of your good works and you will be judged a liar
and a hypocrite.’ … Beloved soul dedicated to God, keep clear of people like
that… God shows no partiality (Acts 10:34). He does not take account of
nobility of birth, length of time in his service or the number of our good
works… He does not consider how you once behaved, but what you have now begun
to be… If you recognize that you have conceived God’s most dear Son by a sacred
resolve to strive for perfection, then keep away from the deadly poison I have
just mentioned and, like a woman in labour, hasten with desire and longing
towards a happy delivery.”
It is very
tempting – perhaps more tempting as we grow older – to counsel people against
the “pursuit of perfection”. Apart from anything else, we fear bearing responsibility
for things going wrong. That fear masquerades as kindness, but I don’t know if
it is really a kindness to persuade people to stop rather short of making the
most of their one life. I like the way Bonaventure sees that there is a subtle
argument from guilt here: you don’t have the right background, it’s too late to
start, if you had been going to do that sort of thing you should have been much
more dedicated much earlier… They are arguments we use against ourselves, too,
to suppress those troublesome aspirations that can start up at any age.
Well, enough
of Bonaventure. I’ve wanted to show by a few examples that to read these old
religious writers isn't necessarily a waste of time even for an unreligious
person like myself. I’d like to be more positive still, and to say that the
most brilliant (or rather, the wisest) thinkers of the middle ages have a slant
on life that is peculiarly different from ours, and that’s precisely why we
ought to read them occasionally. They lack so many of our cultural assumptions:
they are pre-scientific, pre-technological, pre-national, almost pre-literary
(that is, they don’t make our distinction between “literature” and any other
sort of writing). And sometimes I too want to get behind those cultural assumptions
and look at what’s left: the bare, universal, concerns of being alive.