However, secular intellectuals have, unfortunately, long suffered from a temperamental suspicion of institutions, rooted in the Romantic worldview which has coloured cultural life since the nineteenth century. Romanticism has taught us to mock the ponderousness and strictures of institutions, their tendencies to corruption and their tolerance of mediocrity. The ideal of the intellectual has been that of a free spirit living beyond the confines of any system, disdainful of money, cut off from practical affairs and privately proud of being unable to read a balance sheet.
If people’s inner lives remain even today more likely to be influenced by the biblical prophets than by secular thinkers, it is due in large part to the fact that the latter have been consistently unwilling to create institutional structures through which their soul-related ideas might be successfully disseminated to a wider audience. Those with an interest in addressing the needs of the secular soul have typically lacked scale, stable conditions of employment and the capacity to transmit their views through the mass media. Instead, volatile individual practitioners run what are in effect cottage industries, while organized religions infiltrate our consciousness with all the might and sophistication available to institutional power.
The modern world is not, of course, devoid of institutions. It is filled with commercial corporations of unparalleled size which have an intriguing number of organizational traits in common with religions. But these corporations focus only on our outer, physical needs, on selling us cars and shoes, pizzas and telephones. Religion’s great distinction is that while it has a collective power comparable to that of modern corporations pushing the sale of soap and mashed potatoes, it addresses precisely those inner needs which the secular world leaves to disorganized and vulnerable individuals.
The challenge is hence to create — via a study of religious institutions — secular entities that could meet the needs of the inner self with all the force and skill that corporations currently apply to satisfying the needs of the outer.
2.
Among the fundamental lessons of religions as institutions are the importance of scale and the benefits that flow from being able properly to aggregate money, intelligence and status.
Whereas Romanticism glorifies the achievements of singular heroes, religions know how much will be impossible if individuals act alone. Outside of an organization, we may now and then succeed in securing a brief spike of fame for ourselves, but we will never be able to place our achievements on a stable footing, consistently replicate our insights or bridge our weaknesses. Sole authorship cannot be a logical long-term response to solving the complexities of significant issues. We should ask why in matters of the soul we continue to believe in cloistered, companionless methods of assembly that we long ago disavowed in relation to the manufacture of pharmaceuticals or aircraft.
That we often think about deodorant and God but much less often meditate on the ideas of individual writers is reflected in a comparison of three statistics: the annual revenues of, respectively, the Catholic Church, a consumer goods company and the best-paid individual writer on the planet (the other 99.9 % of authors would not, of course, even register on the chart).
Then there is the matter of income. Institutions spare their members the humiliations and terrors of the sole trader. Their ability to pool capital, distribute it between projects and let it accumulate over decades enables them to survive lean periods and make adequate investments in research, marketing, recruitment and technology.
Whatever modern democracies may tell themselves about their commitment to free speech and to diversity of opinion, the values of a given society will uncannily match those of whichever organizations have the scale to pay for runs of thirty-second slots around the nightly news bulletin.
Scale has a similar impact on recruitment. Wealthy institutions can attract the best members of a generation, rather than just the blindly devoted or the irrationally committed. They can appeal to the large and psychologically healthy pool of candidates who care as much about garnering esteem and material comfort as they do about bettering the lot of mankind.
That a job is simply ‘interesting’ is never going to be enough to attract high numbers of the most energetic and ambitious employees.
Consider the respective careers of Thomas Aquinas and Friedrich Nietzsche. Some of the differences between their fates came down to the relative mental stability of the two men, but a good share of Aquinas’s equanimity must also be attributed to the benevolent spiritual and material atmosphere he benefited from, first at the University of Paris, where he was Regent Master, and then at the theological college he helped to found in Naples. Nietzsche felt he lived by contrast (and in his own words) ‘like a wild animal hunted out of every lair’. His life’s project — to replace Christian morality with a secular ideology revolving around philosophy, music and art — found no favour with nineteenth-century German academia, forcing the philosopher into nomadic exile. Although he is frequently celebrated as a supreme exemplar of heroic individualism, the philosopher would in truth have appreciated nothing more than to exchange his isolation for a collegial establishment which could have lent his ideas a greater weight in the world.
Institutions have the added benefit of being able to offer permanent status to individuals simply on the basis of their membership, saving them from having to earn it on their own, over and over again, year by year. A lone thinker may be near the end of his or her life — or even, like Nietzsche, long dead — before the public notices that a good idea has sprung from someone without corporate status. Within an institution, all members can tap into a reputation built up by illustrious forebears and reinforced by elegant buildings and sleek bureaucratic processes. They can take on an ancient title — priest or archdeacon, professor or minister — and make use, for genuine ends, of the resources and lustre stored within a structure that is larger and more enduring than themselves.
Many would no doubt argue that modern society must already have all the institutions it needs. In practice, however, those who are drawn to what Catholicism has termed cura animarum, ‘the care of souls’, but who feel unable to effect this care in religious ways, are all too likely to end up compromised for want of a coherent network of colleagues, a tolerable income and a stable and dignified professional structure within which to operate. It is a measure of how deeply ingrained the problem is that we would even now struggle to give Nietzsche a professional home.
Only religions have been able to turn the needs of the soul into large quantities of money. (illustration credit 10.3)
3.
Another useful feature of institutions is their ability to coalesce the efforts of their members through a shared visual vocabulary. Here again, the strategies of religions and commercial corporations overlap. While the sight of a cross emblazoned on the side of an ecclesiastical building or a lamb embroidered on an altar cloth has frequently prompted the observation that Christianity was an early and adept practitioner of the same kind of ‘branding’ that our modern corporations specialize in, the truth is, of course, the reverse: it is the corporations that have faithfully adopted the lessons in identity pioneered by religions.