A few years ago, good friends of mine asked me to be the godfather to their eldest son. Being of no fixed religious abode, after much thought I declined: I don't believe in God, and it seemed somehow dishonest to swear to uphold his values. Ever since, while not resiling from my atheist beliefs at all, I have regretted letting dear friends down in this way, without ever having been able to rationalise why: my reasoning felt earnest, logical and therefore, I thought, impeccable. Nonetheless, deep down I couldn't shake the feeling it was absolutely wrong.
It was, and this wonderful little book by Richard Holloway has helped me understand why.
Holloway is, or was, formerly Bishop of Edinburgh in the Scottish Episcopal Church. More significantly, for the purposes of persuading your sceptical old goat of a correspondent, he's a learned, widely read and elegant writer who firmly sets his stall in the pragmatic, liberal tradition. Holloway appeals from the same quarter as the late Richard Rorty, and his underlying message resonates with Rorty's vision, eludicated in
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
of a diverse community characterised by its members' freedom to invoke whatever stories they feel suitable to provide meaning to their lives but bound by common assent that, such freedoms notwithstanding, as
Judith Shklar
put it, "cruelty is the worst thing we do".
Holloway's disposition is to frame his moral worldview in terms of lessons that can be learned from literature, philosophy and myth (science, generally, not being much help for forming moral worldviews) and, as pragmatists tend not to be, he's not bothered that complete and coherent reconciliation of all the works of literature he might cite is not possible (Holloway's range of references is as broad as it is eclectic, covering (among many others) Homer, Plato, the Bible, Descartes, Shakespeare, Shelley, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Dostoevsky, Tennessee Williams, Auden, Larkin, Rorty, Andrea Dworkin, Ridley Scott and Mike Newell - just try knitting that into a self-contained, consistent, coherent whole), provided that the parts he extracts, woven into the fabric of Holloway's philosophy, tell a meaningful story.
That is to say, provided our literature (however one might describe it) is deployed usefully in an instructive and metaphorical way, it doesn't matter that other aspects might suffer from internal logical inconsistencies or be at risk of factual falsification. To bother about such things is, to Richard Holloway, entirely to miss the point. And, while he (rightly) isn't mentioned even by name, anti-Christian aggravator-in-chief
Richard Dawkins
must surely be who Holloway has in mind when he alludes to the "particularly ugly debate" going on about this at the moment.
Instead, Holloway writes lyrically, elegantly, and forcefully about how we should be thinking about organising our lives, and his view is (quietly but convincingly) that science-toting pseudo-rationalists who seek societal Nirvana through squashing religions and other deemed irrationalities (
Francis Wheen
is, I suppose, another good example) are missing the point and poisoning the well from which, pragmatically, we all (religious or not) need to draw the water to irrigate our collective relations.
It is in the nature of his endeavour that Between the Monster and the Saint is a somewhat meandering journey, rather like the sort of woodland walk on which you can imagine Holloway embarking to ruminate on these verities, but it's also a short and sweetly written one, hearty and refreshing and, for me at least, it has had the restorative effect of a bracing excursion in a beautiful environment with a learned and thoughtful elder of the tribe.
I've made my apologies to my friends about the Christening, but I missed that boat. My loss. I won't do it again.
Olly Buxton
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