Comte’s legacy, nevertheless, was his recognition that secular society requires its own institutions, ones that could take the place of religions by addressing human needs which fall outside the existing remits of politics, the family, culture and the workplace. His challenge to us lies in his suggestion that good ideas will not be able to flourish if they are always left inside books. In order to thrive, they must be supported by institutions of a kind that only religions have so far known how to build.
While no churches for the Religion of Humanity were ever built in Comte’s lifetime, several decades after his death a group of Brazilian enthusiasts (one of them, as Comte himself had predicted, a wealthy banker) came together to fund the first such institution in Paris. They initially planned to erect a large edifice in the Place de la Bastille, but after reviewing the scope of their funds, they settled instead on adapting an apartment on the first floor of a building in the Marais. They hired an artist about whom history has subsequently been silent to paint portraits of the founder’s secular saints and, at the front of the converted living room, an imposing neo-altarpiece of a woman and child, representing Humanity holding the Future in her arms. (illustration credit 10.11)
Comte’s secular saints included Gutenberg, Shakespeare, Descartes and the physiologist Bichat. (illustration credit 10.12)
iii. Conclusion
1.
A central problem with any attempt to rethink some of the needs left unmet by the ebbing of religion is novelty.
Whereas we are for the most part well disposed to embrace the new in technology, when it comes to social practices, we are as deeply devoted to sticking with what we know. We are reassured by traditional ways of handling education, relationships, leisure time, ceremonies and manners. We are especially resistant to innovations which can be pegged to the thought of one person alone. To have the best chance of being taken up, ideas should seem like the product of common sense or collective wisdom rather than an innovation put forward by any single individual. What would likely be seen as a bold innovation in software can too easily, in the social sphere, come across as a cult of personality.
It is to the benefit of most religions that they have been around for many centuries, a characteristic which appeals strongly to our fondness for what we are accustomed to. We naturally defer to practices that we would reject as extraordinary if they were newly suggested to us. A few millennia can do wonders to render a fanciful idea respectable. A ritual pilgrimage to the shrine of St Anthony may be inherently no less strange, and perhaps even more irrational, than a pilgrimage around an orbital motorway, but the shrine in Padua enjoys at least one great advantage over the M25 in having been in place since the middle of the thirteenth century.
2.
Fortunately for the concepts examined here, none are new. They have existed for most of human history, only to be over-hastily sacrificed a few hundred years ago on the altar of Reason and unfairly forgotten by secular minds repelled by religious doctrines.
It has been the purpose of this book to identify some of the lessons we might retrieve from religions: how to generate feelings of community, how to promote kindness, how to cancel out the current bias towards commercial values in advertising, how to select and make use of secular saints, how to rethink the strategies of universities and our approach to cultural education, how to redesign hotels and spas, how better to acknowledge our own childlike needs, how to surrender some of our counterproductive optimism, how to achieve perspective through the sublime and the transcendent, how to reorganize museums, how to use architecture to enshrine values — and, finally, how to coalesce the scattered efforts of individuals interested in the care of souls and organize them under the aegis of institutions.
3.
It has already been conceded that a book cannot achieve very much on its own. It can, however, be a place to lay down ambitions and begin to sketch out some intellectual as well as practical trajectories. The essence of the argument presented here is that many of the problems of the modern soul can successfully be addressed by solutions put forward by religions, once these solutions have been dislodged from the supernatural structure within which they were first conceived. The wisdom of the faiths belongs to all of mankind, even the most rational among us, and deserves to be selectively reabsorbed by the supernatural’s greatest enemies. Religions are intermittently too useful, effective and intelligent to be abandoned to the religious alone.
Acknowledgements
I am deeply indebted to the following for their help in the writing, thinking through or production of this book: Deirdre Jackson, Dorothy Straight, Joana Niemeyer, Richard Baker, Cecilia Mackay, Grainne Kelly, Richard Holloway, Charles Taylor, Mark Vernon, John Armstrong, James Wood, A. C. Grayling, Robert Wright, Sam Harris, Terry Eagleton, Niall Ferguson, John Gray, Lucienne Roberts, Rebecca Wright, Simon Prosser, Anna Kelly, Juliette Mitchell, Dan Frank, Nicole Aragi, Caroline Dawnay, Phil Chang and his team, Thomas Greenall, Jordan Hodgson, Nigel Coates and Charlotte, Samuel and Saul de Botton.
Picture Credits
Andrew Aitchison: 2.16; akg-images: 3.3, 4.6; akg-images/Stefan Drechseclass="underline" 9.3 (left); Alamy/ Gari Wyn Williams: 3.7; Archconfraternity of San Giovanni Decollato, Rome: 8.6 (left); Archivio Fotografico Messaggero S. Antonio Editrice/Giorgio Deganello: 4.9; Arktos: 9.2; Axiom/Timothy Allen: 2.2; Richard Baker: 4.1, 4.2, 4.15, 4.17, 4.18, 4.19, 4.20, 10.5; Every Word Unmade, 2007, by Fiona Banner, courtesy of the Artist and Frith Street Gallery, London: 8.3; from Brigitte et Bernard © Audrey Bardou: 8.5 (below); from The Roman Missal, 1962 © Baronius Press, 2009: 2.7; Nathan Benn: 2.14; Jean-Christophe Benoist: 1.2; © Bibliothèque Nationale de France: 4.16; Big Pictures: 6.2; Bridgeman Art Library/Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris: 10.10; Bridgeman/British Library, London: 3.1; Bridgeman/Chiesa del Gesù, Rome: 9.3 (right); Bridgeman/Church of the Gesuiti, Venice/Cameraphoto Arte Venezia: 1.1; Bridgeman/Duomo, Siena: 2.9; Bridgeman/ Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge: 4.13; Bridgeman/Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence: 5.1, 8.4 (above); Bridgeman/Galleria dell’ Accademia Carrara, Bergamo: 5.4; Bridgeman/Hermitage, St Petersburg: 8.21 (below); Bridgeman/Neil Holmes: 9.7; Bridgeman/© Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston: 8.17; Bridgeman/Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie, Besançon/Giraudon: 8.8 (above); Bridgeman/Musée du Louvre, Paris/Giraudon: 8.1, 8.16; Bridgeman/Museo di San Marco dell’Angelico, Florence/Giraudon: 8.18 (above); Bridgeman/Musée d’Unterlinden, Colmar: 8.7; Bridgeman/National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo/Photo © Zev Radovan: 2.11; Bridgeman/Noortman Master Paintings, Amsterdam: 6.1; Bridgeman/Prado, Madrid: 8.14 (above); Bridgeman/Private Collection: 4.7; Bridgeman/St Peter’s, Vatican City: 8.12 (above); Bridgeman/Scrovegni Chapel, Padua: 3.4; by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library: 3.6; Camera Press, London/Butzmann/Laif: 2.6; © Nicky Colton-Milne: 2.12; from the Garden Ruin series © François Coquereclass="underline" 8.9 (below); Corbis/Robert Mulder/Godong: 2.15; Corbis/Bob Sacha: 4.11; Jean-Pierre Dalbéra: 10.11, 10.12; Fczarnowski: 5.2; Peter Aprahamian/Freud Museum, London: 3.8 (below); Gabinetto Fotografico Nazionale, Rome: 8.6 (right); from the Remember Me series © Preston Gannaway/Concord Monitor: 8.13 (below); Getty Images: 8.19 (below), 9.1, 10.4; Thomas Greenall & Jordan Hodgson: 2.10, 2.18, 3.5, 3.8 (above), 4.8, 5.5, 6.4, 7.1, 8.11, 8.23, 9.6, 9.8, 9.11, 10.3, 10.6 (below); Dan Hagerman: 10.8; from The Sunday Missal © HarperCollins, 1984: 4.12; istockphoto.com: 9.10 (above); Rob Judges: 4.3; New York, c.1940, by Helen Levitt © Estate of Helen Levitt, courtesy Laurence Miller Gallery, New York: 8.15 (below); Linkimage/Gerry Johansson: 2.1; Red Slate Circle, 1987, by Richard Long. Courtesy of the Artist and Haunch of Venison, London © Richard Long. All Rights Reserved. DACS, 2010: 8.22 (below); Mary Evans Picture Library: 2.17; © Mazur/catholicchurch.org.uk: 2.4, 2.5, 2.8, 8.10 (below); © Museum of London: 9.10; Naoya Fujii: 9.5; PA Photos/AP/Bernat Armangue: 2.13; PA Photos/Balkis Press/Abacapress: 10.7; Panos Pictures/Xavier Cevera: 4.4; John Pitts: 9.10 (below); from Contrasts, 1841, by A.W.N. Pugin: 9.4; Reuters/Yannis Behrakis: 6.3; Reuters/STR: 10.9; Rex Features: 3.5 (inset), 4.14; Lucienne Roberts & David Shaw: 3.2, 10.6 (above); Scala/Art Institute of Chicago: 5.5 (inset); Scala/Pierpont Morgan Library, New York: 4.5, 4.10; Scala/ White Images: 8.20 (above); Untitled — October 1998, by Hannah Starkey, courtesy Maureen Paley, London: 2.3; Mathew Stinson: 5.3; National Gallery I, London 1989 by Thomas Struth, courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris © Thomas Struth: 8.2; Westminster Cathedral, London: 8.10 (above); Katrina Wiedner: 140, 9.9.