Episode 57 - Writers For Whom Religion Just Made Matters More Complicated

I had an interesting exchange a little while back about an author whose works I really like, and who I went through a “reading jag” phase, you could say, where I was reading my way through as many of his works as I can get my hands on, and that was Graham Greene. Now, it was back in graduate school when I first got into his work, and it was not through one of his, you know, considered to be “best” novels. I’d heard his name, I picked up, I think it’s called A Gun for Sale, and it was really good! And I was like, “Oh, I’ve got to read more of this guy.”

So in any case, I had this exchange with somebody who was talking about how they were reading Graham Greene, and we got to talking about different circles that we moved in. And this guy was saying that typically, the people who like Graham Greene are going to be lapsed Catholics. And I thought, “Well, that’s a weird thing to say.” Although, you know, certainly that’s what I was when I was reading him; I’d left the church a long time before, actually back when I was in Catholic high school, and hadn’t come back at that time. But I really enjoyed Greene.

And Greene was one of those Catholic writers himself who winds up being a convert, and never is entirely at ease. He’s always got some controversies going on, the characters who are conflicted about that sort of thing. And so, we got into this conversation online, and I said, “You know, that’s not really my experience. I know a lot of practicing Catholics who like Graham Greene, I know a lot of atheists who like Graham Greene. I suppose that if you are a person of faith who’s struggling with faith, maybe Greene would be an interesting person for you to read, both in terms of his characters and in terms of his own viewpoints. But, you know, he’s not all that unique in that respect.”

And then I said (here’s where we’re actually going to get to the main point of this) something that I’ve said many times before in AMA sessions, and when I’m asked about these sorts of things: I like reading religious authors for whom being religious doesn’t simplify things. It actually makes things more complicated. And in some respects conflicted, but also rich. It reflects a world, a universe, a cosmos in which there’s greater depth and complexity than a nice, simple, straightforward one.

I think that there’s a lot of people who are religious in different ways for whom, we’ll just take Christianity, you know, meeting Jesus suddenly cleared up all of their doubts and gave them the rule of life that they’re going to follow and boxes that everything can fit into. They understand exactly who the sheep and the goats are, or the wheat and the chaff.

And when people say stuff like that, I’m usually a little bit suspicious of their epistemological stance, not least because in those Gospels, it’s not up to them to decide! We see so many cases where the person who we think is definitely going to be the good guy turns out not to be so, and vice versa, or mercy is shown to somebody who you wouldn’t expect is going to receive it. There are all sorts of paradoxical statements. And we’re cautioned in quite a few places about making absolute judgments as if we have a God’s-eye view.

Nonetheless, a lot of people, and not just in Christianity, but all sorts of religions, will say, “Oh, everything is now clear to me.” Usually what that results in is a kind of impoverished world.

And I’m actually going to draw upon another convert Catholic thinker whose conversion also made his life quite a bit more complicated: G.K. Chesterton. In his book Orthodoxy, which is a really great short little work, he talks about the insane person, the madman. And he says that the real problem with the madman is that his world actually is logically consistent, but it’s able to be so because it is impoverished. It is a world that, in certain respects, is too small.

So that’s a very interesting observation. He doesn’t say they’re wrong. He says that you can’t really deal with the madman withou