Of Briseis and Achilles

What a tortured soul it must be to turn to religion. That religion is a delusion is not the question. How did they get away with it for so long? That is the question.

Hell no! Religion’s a party. A party to celebrate life—life contemplative, intimate, communal and civic. Think of the holidays, food, drink, pageantry, art, music and singing. It can be ecstatic, or like a dawn picnic on the beach with friends—familiar, companionable and rich beyond tears.

Why celebrate life? How can we but celebrate—it’s so fantastic! Just reflecting on life awakens delight. Death and pain are there, but they goad us to explore life’s depth. This is the world of religion: life, celebration, reflection, suffering and meaning. Don’t bring a spectrometer. Bring trumpets and cymbals, strings and tambourines, cheeky piccolos and deep-throated bassoons.

Before civilisation, life was celebrated in song and dance with myths and rituals that stored tribal lore and framed one’s identity. The invention of grain-growing led to civilisation, bringing tribes together—and with it came an existential crisis. We could still celebrate in the manner of our tribe, but the quest for universal answers had begun. Writing followed, so that the wisdom of sages could be preserved, pondered and compared.

A sage’s teaching resonates over time. Science is informed by patterns, religion by these resonances. Any religion of antiquity deserves our respect because it has been tested, maintaining resonance for generations, through war and peace, famine and plenty, and by surviving has cemented civil society. It is a “pearl” of a kind. But not everyone sees it this way. For some, their cause is objective truth, and anything else is just guessing.

Those for whom objective reasoning comes easily are likely be attracted to vocations where this is prized—just as someone with strong personal empathy might be drawn to others. We tend to see the world through the lens of our own strengths. But there are proper limits to objectivity, just as there are proper limits to empathy. It is in denying their limits we make them toxic. Scientism is unbridled objectivity.

Scientism troubles science in the same way that “reforming” judges trouble the judiciary and radical fringe groups trouble mainstream political parties. Sincerely promoting their ideals, they spend the credit that others have saved.

When a renowned cosmologist denigrates religion, assuring us that the universe could come into being without a creator, this resonates because of science’s objectivity. But what qualifies them to speak on religion? They are saying that science doesn’t merely study patterns, but that patterns are sovereign. Science doesn’t require this. Hypothetically, if a microbiologist were to be healed by a miracle, integrity would not demand that they give up their job. They could continue as before, just saying there are more things in heaven and earth …

The proponents of scientism not only hold religion to be delusional, they hold it to be bad. As scientism has been around for centuries and has been embraced by various regimes, we can examine its own performance as a practical system of ethics. Scientism has been unable to establish any canon or creed, and this makes it difficult both to maintain orthodoxy and to form a curriculum to teach it. Hence the popular movements generated by scientism have been diverse, contradictory and shortlived, such as Unitarianism, utilitarianism, Nietzscheism, scientific communism, secular humanism and Freudian psychology.

Scientism rejects the idea of transcendence and so offers no ultimate hope for those who defend virtue. It also offers no sanction beyond the law for those offending its taboos. There is no psychological brake against the abuse of power. Consequently, scientistic regimes have been unable to sustain civil society. Scientism as a religion lacks a mature organisation, so that anyone may claim to speak on its behalf. Scientism therefore avoids accountability for the excesses of its proponents. Scientism can’t nourish the soul that it doesn’t believe in. Insisting that man does live by bread alone, scientism lacks a spirit of celebration or much by way of music or song of its own. Seeing life as a pattern of chemical reactions, it is weak in the taboos that flow out of the reverencing of life. Chemical reactions have no intrinsic worth. In times of security and prosperity, when we feel safe and comfortable, the weakness of its taboos is part of scientism’s appeal. Taboos constrain, but they also protect. We may yet be glad of those protections.

Where scientism expresses its ethic in mere aphorisms such as, “Do no harm”, it lacks the sophistication needed to inform our consciences, jurists and legislators. But where it has achieved sophistication, the “scriptures” of scientism have been the scripts of murderous regimes.

Religion provides a constant message in changing times. The durability of its teaching is its virtue, in a similar way to national constitutions, which are valued for their stability ahead of their logic. By contrast, the strength of science is in its eagerness to qualify or abandon past opinions. This refines our knowledge of the material world but is too unstable for the civic role of religion. For all its strengths, doubt-driven science is not a practical source for a durable system of ethics.

Science, like law, places a premium on objectivity and eschews emotion. Emotions only cloud judgment in law and science. But there are places where not only are emotions permissible, their absence is unhealthy. Parenting is an example. Religion, being a celebration, is another. This doesn’t diminish the importance or seriousness of either parenting or religion. So scientism suffers as a religion for its dourness. Substance abuse and celluloid fantasy become the soul’s escape from its sterility.

Religion draws on our capacity for reverence. Science is a critical, reductive process, and reverence is an impediment to its objectivity. Hence scientism is iconoclastic and tends to deride the sacred. But there is more to reverence than mere sentimentality and it is usually regarded as a benign part of our psyche.

Therefore, despite its vague appeal, we can be sceptical of scientism as an alternative to religion, especially as it has failed to settle any canon or creed.

It is no defence to say that scientism only tries to expose the irrationality of belief systems rather than establish its own. Science is not the measure of all things. That would be to make a god of a good. Religions don’t try to be science and so it makes as much sense to use science to critique religion as it does to use science to critique art. A scientist might tell us that Picasso’s clock would never keep time. How could that be art!

Worse than being wrong, scientism is culpable when it denigrates religion. Our consciences and our legal system demand ethics and taboos from which there is no other practical source. Their absence produces unspeakable suffering. For scientism to demolish the “thought slums” of religion and leave no moral shelter in its place is a crime, not a virtue. Slander requires no particular skill, but we can be accountable for its damage. Communists slandered free markets and removed them from great nations. Having destroyed, they built nothing, leaving tragedy. Might we not hold communists accountable despite their idealism? Hubris is not just an over-reaching by the bold and clever, it is culpable recklessness by the arrogant.

Scientism harms science. Darwinist evolution is a compelling and plausible theory. However, it claims a lot and it is in the spirit of science to critically test those claims. Scientism recruited Darwinism to champion atheism so that now it’s impossible to objectively critique Darwinism—its defenders have too much invested in its preservation. Huxley created this problem, using Darwinism as a club with which to beat deists.

Unitarianism may have faded under the attack but Christianity did not, being based on the reliability of the Gospels rather than on biology. The Gospel miracles still cannot be explained as natural events. Archaeology has corroborated where it might have disproven. Textual criticism has exposed no fault lines between myth and history in the Gospels.

Ancient creeds required no change to accommodate science. The Sermon on the Mount lost none of its resonance. For all our science, in the desperate wars of the last century we again turned to God, the churches of the 1950s burgeoning in gratitude for deliverance.

Being part of life’s experience, the physical world is a proper subject for our scientific curiosity. Science also helps build a more intelligent, prosperous and humane world, reducing suffering through its discoveries. The science community should be jealous to preserve the respect it has earned. Science itself should be the scourge of scientism. It is no business of science to speculate on the existence or nonexistence of a creator. It is not ludicrous to suppose that human selfconsciousness derived from a greater consciousness rather than from particles randomly tossed. If such a creator exists and wants to be known, then we’re not going to earn that revelation by building a big telescope. If they don’t want us to see them, then we’re hardly likely to outsmart and spot them anyway. Religion is not a branch of science and its credibility is established other than by objective proof.

The celebration of life is synonymous with the reverencing of life as the essence of our being. Religions typically create rituals to reverence life at three stages: at birth, to welcome it; at marriage, to dignify the life act; and at death, to honour life’s passing. It is from this reverencing of life that we derive our taboos. How can we celebrate life if we don’t welcome, dignify and honour it?

Truly celebrating life requires us to embrace life as the messy business it is. Malcolm Muggeridge used to say that the spires of the Gothic cathedrals point to our capacity to conceive the ideal, while their gargoyles laugh at our incapacity to attain it.

The confronting and resolution of that reality are at the heart of religion and much of the arts. Wolfgang Petersen’s movie Troy is not The Iliad but it does portray ancient themes in a way that is accessible. In Troy, the following dialogue takes place between Briseis, the pious Trojan virgin, and Achilles, her Greek captor, just after he rescues her from being ravaged by Greek soldiers:

Achilles: Are you hurt? [No answer.] I watched you fight them. You have courage.

Briseis: To fight back when people attack me? A dog has that kind of courage.

Achilles (offering food): Eat.

Briseis: I’ve known men like you my whole life.

Achilles: No, you haven’t.

Briseis: You think you’re so different from a thousand others. Soldiers understand nothing but war. Peace confuses them.

Achilles: And you hate these soldiers?

Briseis: I pity them.

Achilles: Trojan soldiers died trying to protect you. Perhaps they deserve more than your pity.

Briseis: Why did you choose this life?

Achilles: What life?

Briseis: To be a great warrior.

Achilles: I chose nothing. I was born and this is what I am. And you? Why did you choose to love a god? I think you’ll find the romance one-sided.

Briseis: Do you enjoy provoking me?

Achilles: You’ve dedicated your life to the gods. Zeus, god of thunder. Athena, goddess of wisdom. You serve them.

Briseis: Yes, of course.

Achilles: And Ares, god of war? Who blankets his bed with the skin of men he’s killed?

Briseis (reluctantly): All the gods are to be feared and respected.

Achilles: I’ll tell you a secret. Something they don’t teach you in your temple. The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal. Because any moment might be our last. Everything’s more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.

Briseis: I thought you were a dumb brute. I could have forgiven a dumb brute.

Briseis forgoes the chance to kill Achilles that night and instead they are united as lovers. Later, Achilles disfigures the body of an enemy but weeps when confronted with the truth of his brutishness. At the end, the dying Achilles says to Briseis, “It’s all right. You gave me peace in a lifetime of war.” It is unsaid, but having embraced Ares/Achilles, she too was saved—from the barren frigidity of her onesided romance.

In Lord of the Rings Frodo forgoes the opportunity to kill treacherous Gollum. It is Frodo’s painful acceptance that he is both Samwise and Gollum that ultimately saves him—and the free world. In Phantom of the Opera it is when Christine can embrace the obsessive spirit (phantom) of her late father that she is free to receive the wholesome intimacy of Raoul. In Islam, the fasting of Ramadan ends with the feasting of Eid. In Christianity the two great festivals are Christmas and Easter—birth, suffering, death, resolution. Buddhism has yin and yang.

To scientism, all this is delusional. Life is a reaction of chemicals—no more, no less. Bertrand Russell counselled us to embrace despair. The hardware exists for its own sake, there is no program, no meaning, no purpose and there is nothing to celebrate. Grow up!

But why God? I think the answer is in history—seen as a cauldron. Before history we resolved the tensions of life by not resolving them. We were fatalists, animistic and polytheistic. The chaos of our lives was a reflection of a chaos beyond. Some deference was paid to piety but power, politics and passion were dominant.

Then a tribe of monotheists arose for whom piety was their passion. Through every exigency a remnant clung to their God and became an extraordinary nation—by no means perfect, but far more caring, healthful and communal than any other. Their integrity so shone that, in exile, they would be trusted with positions of high authority. Their gentle piety softened the hearts of rulers but made others contemptuous. Their broad ethic was Do justly, love mercy and walk humbly with thy God.

Jesus transformed this exemplary tribal religion (bound up in intricate laws) into a universalistic religion accessible to all regardless of tribe, race or status—the law now being written on the heart. His ethic was higher—to heal with radical virtue (grace). Love your enemies. Forgive wantonly. Don’t even think evil. Surrender your life in service as a living sacrifice to God. You will fall short but God too forgives wantonly.

It was all based on a loving God who sees the good that is done in secret and rewards it, both within and beyond this life. And did it resonate! Jesus became the hinge of human history—BC, AD.

Jesus resolved joy and suffering in his own death and resurrection. Something of a “party animal”, he celebrated life. His first miracle was to replenish the wine at a wedding. He was criticised for feasting openly and for his disciples not fasting. He promised life—life to the full. He invited his friends to join him for an eternal banquet—to carry on the party forever! He killed death and gave life freely to any who would but embrace their Gollum, even as did the thief on the cross. His words resonated: “the crowds were amazed at his teaching, because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law”. The contradictions of the human drama were resolved in the Trinity—a cosmic love-dance.

Take God out of all this and you are not left with humanism. Take God out and it just falls apart. For those who have experienced this adventure of grace, humanism is not the culmination of Christianity but rather the ethical wake left by believing generations, a pale reflection, an empty husk.

Briseis clung to her frigidity as piety. It is very human to project our weaknesses as strengths—both to ourselves and to others. Briseis found her self only when she embraced what she once held in contempt. Scientism demands life be tidy and knowable. It is awkward with messy reality. Scientism is arid materialism projecting itself as being mature, honest and objective.

Sex and religion are both problematic—and yet they have been rich, joyful and healthy dimensions of the human experience since time immemorial. What to do? Try letting the enemy in—to breakfast by the beach, as he did all those years ago.